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MCR: When I look up close at small, intricate passages of your work I find a sensual quality, but when I step back and see the work in its entirety there is a feeling of spirituality. CP: That is interesting. It is uncomfortable for me to use the word spiritual. It is fraught. It is like using 'beauty' but now you can talk about beauty again. In my work I use divine symmetries and mathematical ratios and relationships that are supposed to have harmonies that are transcendent or complete something in us. So we find a lot of beauty in them and they elicit a feeling of the spiritual. That feeling from the work also may come from a sense that it is coalescing and dissolving at the same time. You mentioned the word sensual and when I articulate the surfaces they can become sensuous but if that goes too far they become too real and might fall into the trap of being so illusionistic that you don't believe things will just dissipate and become something else. So I am interested now in pulling my work back to getting to this feeling more of pure possibility. MCR: It is interesting that you mentioned the discomfort of using the word beauty because the first time I saw your work I was instantly struck by its beauty and later I heard you say that people often need to find meaning in the work so they understand what its purpose is beyond beauty. The suggestion might be that either beauty alone is not enough or perhaps we’re uncomfortable talking about beauty because we feel limited in our vocabulary to discuss it in those terms so instead we focus on meaning. CP: Right. If you read a lot of critical writing or discourse on art they often skirt those issues. They want to talk about what were the ideas behind the work and what is the social connection or the political or ecological connection. There are many artists here who are really engaged with the culture around them, but I focused inward all of the time. I demonstrate my concerns for the environment by driving a fuel-‐efficient car and I have a photovoltaic system on my roof to make electricity from the sun and I compost but it is not in my work. You wouldn't see it in my work. Not all critics avoid talking about beauty though. There are some writers like Roberta Smith and Holland Cotter who will describe work as beautiful or elegant. I do think the reluctance of some to speak in these terms is in part that it is difficult to find words to describe those feelings when you have a beautiful experience. What do we mean when we say, “Wow, it is beautiful?” What does that mean and how do you get something to be beautiful and are we trivializing beauty into something that is merely pretty or decorative? I work with symmetries and they are one of the most common ways of achieving a feeling of beauty. That's why flowers are beautiful or a pinecone is beautiful because we find symmetry to have beauty. But the symmetry has to have disruption to it or we don't actually find it interesting. So it is always finding this balance between symmetry and disruption and bringing some life into symmetry because beauty is never perfect. MCR: We have established that it is uncomfortable to talk about beauty and spirituality and that digging for meaning can be a crutch, but that is exactly what I am going to do next by asking you how your religious upbringing has influenced your work. CP: I was raised in the Judeo-‐Christian tradition. My father was head elder of a Dutch Reformed Church, which was extremely conservative. In 6th grade you are supposed to stand up in front of the church and make a confession about faith and as a 6th grader I remember thinking, “Do I believe this, what does this mean? If there was nothing before there was something, what did that look like and before there was something then how could God be nothing and where was space?” I had all of these very troubling and big issues when I was in 6th grade so I had this little game: I would go up in my room at night and I look out my window up in the sky and experience a feeling of unboundedness, an immensity that there was and I would try to close my eyes really tight and just get rid of things, like get rid of the house, get rid of the
town, get rid of the Earth, and then consider what that would that look like. How could it be that there was nothing if there was something? So it was very perplexing and I did not join the church. My poor father. In a way those early church experiences drove me in my life to figure out why is there something instead of nothing and what is something and why are things the way they are and what else could they be? At the base of it is the idea that everything is pure possibility or pure flux and then they have these singular moments and they resolve and manifest into something and then they leave. That is like the idea of multiple universes and that all of these possibilities are played out and you are hopping from one to another. In this pursuit it became apparent that I really liked questions. I try to keep my work open in that sense. MCR: When you chose to not join that church, did that lead you to check out other faiths? CP: I did look at a number of historical and ancient wisdom traditions and certainly I have an interest in cosmologies and theories of everything that try to answer things for people. I was also really interested in the rich imagery of the Catholic church and the intense representations of blood, flesh and objects because I was a Calvinist, which had iconoclastic traditions that meant no images. The Calvinists are about denial of the body so my work has an affinity for the work of Agnes Martin and Ann Hamilton, both of whom have Calvinist backgrounds. MCR: How does the Calvinist teaching manifest in their work? CP: There is a rigor to the making and to the thinking that goes into those artists’ work that I really admire. I also like mathematicians for their rigor, that they subject their equations to all sorts of things to make sure that they really do hold and then they try to reduce them down to unify them into the smallest units to get the most symmetry, elegance, and beauty they can out of an equation and they use similar words to artists in that way. MCR: You mentioned you are interested in the questions and I think the major religions ask the same questions but it is when they start answering them that the trouble begins. CP: The answers are far less interesting than the questions. The unending, infinitesimal quality of the questions is what interests me. MCR: That is a difficult concept to represent. Your hemispheres have an ethereal quality to them, but they still meet the wall, suggesting some kind of ending. Would full spheres be a way around that problem? CP: Right, the sphere offers a continuous surface and also the possibility of what's inside. With the hemispheres I tried to get around the issue of meeting the wall by having the gesso kind of spread out and froth at the edge to soften it so that you would get this feeling that they were like clouds, that they could just form elsewhere or do something different. But yeah, the edge has been troubling. It would be great if these things could be like holograms. There is this really wonderful book James Elkins wrote called “Beyond Representation: Representing the Unrepresentable in Art and Science.” It talks about how scientists, who are always trying to answer these things, visualize the world. They want to show how things are and so you think about the whole history of science and the kinds of images that has brought to us. Once you are in the macro world that is all fine and good. You can depict it and you can see it. When things start to get small, you have the microscope and then the electron microscope so they were really pretty ingenious actually about seeing what they wanted to see. But now they've gotten to this level they can't see because it is smaller than the speed of light. If light is too big, it is like that's bizarre. And then to find out that there is such a complexity at that level but they can't see it, so they are trying to envision it but how do you? And then I think, well, artists do that all of the time, they are always envisioning things you can't see. Representing what can't be represented, but in a feeling tone kind of way. It is just funny to think about how frustrated scientists must be now.
MCR: There is no end. You peel back a layer and there is always another layer. Thinking of that exhaustive search brings me back to the topic of work ethic. You mentioned the Calvinist heritage giving you a work ethic and when I look at your work, and there is a lot of it, there is clearly a high level of commitment and diligence. You are also a professor and a parent and I recall someone asking you a question at a lecture I attended several years ago about how you balanced these roles and you told a story about building a wall in your home so you could keep an eye on your kids while in your studio. CP: Oh, right. My kids still laugh about that. I put my studio on one side of the living room and they would play on the other end. I built this wall that they couldn't get over because my stuff was dangerous and then I would drill these peep holes in the walls. When they would get bored we would play “Go Fish” over the wall or throw toys back and forth and I still could work and they were quite sporting. Most of my artist friends did not have children because the art world is very competitive and if you want to leave some sort of mark, you have to put a lot of force into it. Children take a lot. I didn't make as much work as my friends who were able to be in their studio all the time, but my mind did not stop. I would see that there were jumps between my work where I could move from one piece to the next. I didn't make all of the pieces that I imagined but I didn’t lag intellectually. I was completely ignorant of pop culture though. I have friends who make fun of me for having never heard of movies that were made during that 20-‐year period. The great thing about my kids growing up seeing me work is that not only did they learn to be autonomous but they realized that I as an artist needed to make my art or I wasn't the person that I needed to be. When I wasn't making my art I learned that I couldn't just give myself over completely to being a mother because then I wasn't a very nice mother. A balance needed to be made. I think I was a good mother. I wasn’t neglectful, but I had to take care of myself so I could take care of my kids. And my children, they respected that so much that from time to time they would say, “Mom I think you should go make some art now.” They could tell that I was getting a little off balance and needed to go do that and come back and be a whole kind of mom. They understood. MCR: That is great. I think that I can see children having an easier time with that than a spouse. If they grow up in that environment, then they see that as normal and necessary and they accept it. CP: Kids are very perceptive and my son will now just walk right through my studio and say, “Oh that's not working.” He is very honest. MCR: What are their interests? Did either study art? CP: They both went to high school for the arts so they have this love of art and ability. My son just got his degree in mathematics and physics and almost a minor in music. He plays electric guitar and bass, heavy metal and jazz. My daughter earned her masters degree at George Washington University in Latin American Studies with an emphasis on Brazil and lived in Sao Paulo. MCR: It is interesting that you incorporate mathematics into your work and that is what your son chose to study. It puts him in an interesting position to critique your work. CP: I actually started college as a chemistry major and my partner is a mathematician. I always tease him that I married him for his brain. It is fascinating to be with somebody who really does think in equations and I mean it is a whole different language, but he really lives in that world. MCR: Your work had that mathematical quality the first time I saw it at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida but you were working on flat surfaces. When did you begin working on domes? CP: Right, I worked flat then. You know, when I did my MFA the work was figurative and I was working on canvas then. After graduate school there is some separation time between what happened to you then and
who you really are because you feel a little bit between yourself and what their program was. That is when I started to do more installation performances working with hair and just exploring my own experiences as a person and also as a mother, as a young mother because then I was also having children. When I came back into more of a studio-‐centered practice in 2001 I started doing little drawings, which was followed by the work on panels that you saw at MOCA-‐J. After that I started rounding the corners of the panels because the corners felt so abrupt. So then I made ellipses and circles. They were flat panels but they took on shapes. I was really getting a handle on my materials and methods and I felt a lot of control there, so then I thought I need to do something to really trip it up so I would have to figure things out in a fresh way. That is when I started to think about curved surfaces. I was teaching in Florence, Italy and they have the domes and I was thinking that the domes represented the most transcendent and beautiful of what anybody knew at the time they were made and looking at them gave me a sense of what it felt like to be alive then. The dome was a metaphor for the cranium and so I picked up that metaphor and went with it. MCR: When did you start working with full spheres? CP: This is the first year. I started working more sculpturally during my Kohler Artist in Residency. When I began working on the curved surface of the hemisphere, what I appreciated was that I no longer had one point perspective. I am no longer creating typical illusionistic space because these have multiple points of view. So, even though I don't consider them sculptures, they do exist in space as objects. My challenge is to use the surface of the object in a way that doesn’t make them feel like solid objects. Another consideration was how do I make something with a closed form feel immense or feel like it could become something else when it is so tangible? I liked the problem of that and that is how the spheres started. MCR: How does the physical form of the hemisphere affect the spatial quality of the mark making? I recall the pieces you exhibited on flat surfaces having the illusion of great depth. CP: Yeah, you cannot do the same illusion because the minute you create the illusion of deep space in one section you then see it from the side and feel that you saw it wrong. So you can punctuate, you can give an illusion to a surface depth and you can use some geometries to fool the eye into thinking that you are going in or you have portals in only certain areas so you are actually offering one point perspective in certain areas. It is like a trick to make it work. With the spheres, I begin them with ideas in my head but I try not to have a totally preconceived idea of how they will emerge. I will do geometry of (on) the sphere that I am working on and I will tackle it with measuring and dividing and getting out my compass and seeing what might unfold and then playing out some forms on it and see where it goes. Somehow the form contains something that I am going to discover or uncover by working with it. The spheres have been interesting in that sense because they are surfaces but they have changed my thinking because they are also complete objects. MCR: This work keeps evolving. What form might it take after the sphere? CP: Well I had this great experience at a show at the Museum of Art and Science in Baton Rouge. They projected my work into the dome of a planetarium and the scale of that was so beautiful. That interested me a great deal. I thought for a while about trying to make these large domes but I didn't want it to seem like some blow-‐up, fun house kind of thing. I just couldn't come up with the solution. The answer is that some architect needs to find me and ask me to do a real dome. I have a feeling it would have some reference to Antoni Gaudi, the architect of the Basilica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, Spain. There is just so much in life to learn. It is so hard to assimilate it all and become proficient enough to master what you are doing. You cannot just be an amateur at what you are doing. You have to get the craft skills down so that what you make is as compelling as possible. That is the tricky part of working across different materials. I am very intrigued by the idea of using a 3D printer to make very complex forms to work on.
MCR: Technology is moving so quickly and that can be both exciting and intimidating for artists. Technology can seem like the enemy if you have honed your craft at making a particular thing and then a product is developed that produces objects indistinguishable from your own. You have to be expert at what you do, but also flexible in the face of technological advancement. Maybe the hologram will be available to you sooner than we think. CP: Sure, I saw them in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and oh my gosh, how fantastic. However, I think it is hard for schools and students to sort that out because there is so much technology and it is used at such a high level in industry that it is hard to access that kind of level and maintain that kind of equipment in art school and it changes so fast. It is just like artists making movies. They can't compete really with Hollywood so sometimes they will have something a bit off to indicate it is an art film so that you are not to compare it to the special effects Hollywood is capable of. It is just kind of funny how artists come to terms with industry. I guess you have to use fabricators these days. MCR: How did you make the decision to bring fiber optic lights and video into your work? CP: I started to put little cut crystals in my flat surface pieces so there would be a flicker of light as a viewer’s eyes moved around it and I just kept thinking about it as this next layer of information; an underlying pattern or piece of information being articulated that wasn't seen at first. My work is about layers of information. The first under drawing done in silver point with all of the hatching marks is a very determined layer and then the graphite wash is another layer of information which is more flux in possibility and then heightened with white, which is emerging as something new. I thought adding the crystals would be like these little universes kind of popping in and out. That was on the flat pieces. When I moved to the domes I had this space on the inside to house technology, so I could put a video machine in there and I thought, “What would I do with lights?” Light is interesting because we use it to transmit so much information. So I thought I would try to do something with light and fiber optics is a low tech lighting solution that allows me to articulate patterns on the surface with lights. MCR: It is almost like the history of art in each piece. You've got a layer of charcoal, which dates back to cave drawings, a layer of silverpoint, which has been used for drawing since the late Gothic/early Renaissance era, a layer of pigment using an acrylic binder which has a more recent history and now you’re introducing fiber optics and video which are much more recent. The one element I mentioned that seems unusual now is silverpoint. How did you become interested in that medium? CP: That is interesting because I started doing silver point because I taught historic materials and methods in Florence to students and we’d go to the art supply store there and they had silverpoint and there are silverpoint drawings in the Uffizi Gallery, so I came back thinking that silverpoint is really useful. It is used as under-‐painting, it doesn't smear, it stays sharp and has a beautiful tone. If you are working in black and white, you can get these strange shifts between warm and cool that add a little breath of life to the piece as well as filling the space because of the warm, cool play. So that is how I brought the silverpoint into the work. MCR: I love that you have merged this very old tradition with video played on an iPod. CP: Yeah, well video can be popped right into your work with very little training. Young children are making movies now. Somebody recently told me I should bring animation into my work and I am thinking, “Oh my God, everybody is doing animation.” Things that once seemed somewhat magical lose their magic when it becomes such a convention. I am thinking of dropping out the video just because it has become so conventional. When I first brought them into my work there weren't that many paintings or things that had video in them but now there are. It's an odd thing.
MCR: I imagine there are far fewer artists working in silverpoint than video. How many contemporary artists do you meet who also work in silverpoint? CP: The Telfair Art Museum put together a show of silverpoint artists and gave me a call because I was one of the artists working on the largest scale. I got to meet all of these other artists working in silverpoint and since then I think I have been curated into about five different silverpoint shows. I found out that there is this whole community. It is very interesting. MCR: Since you work large and use a painstaking process I imagine even the most sophisticated art lover can't resist asking you how long it takes to complete a piece, which is a question that tends to annoy many artists. CP: It is hard to keep track because I am in and out of things all of the time, especially when I am teaching, but I purposefully kept track of one piece just because it was over the summer and I wasn't interrupted, I could just work on it. So I would say that the most a piece has ever taken has been like 700 hours but I am working on a piece now that I am estimating at 800 hours. That is my estimate because I know where I am at with it. But then there are smaller pieces that might only take 40 to 60 hours. MCR: And you teach. CP: Yes. MCR: You are one of these people who make everybody else feel badly about themselves. CP: I have no social life. MCR: How do your students react to your work or your work ethic and what standard do you hold them to? CP: Not everybody has the desire to work as much as I do. I just love my work. It is not painful to go and work. I love it. That is what I like to do. I like to be in my studio for hours on end. That is where I am happiest. So for me, even when I am putting in 40 hours a week teaching, working with graduate students and attending meetings, it's not a problem to put in 60 to 80 hours in the studio. I have a series of bells that I ring going out to my studio so I put my mind right there and sit down and I am focused. My daughter gave me a bell she brought back to Japan. It is the last bell and it is a very long ring and when I get to the end of that ring I am not remembering what I need to cook for dinner or anything like that. It is a practice and this is what I tell my students. I say it is not about being in the mood. You set up a practice and you go to the studio and you work and then the work comes to you. You have to believe that you can solve whatever you put your mind to and you just have to work with it. You can't solve it ahead of time, you have to be there to solve it. MCR: That is a great message, especially with our attachment to smart phones. We surround ourselves with distractions and those things keep us from getting started, but we turn to them because we don’t feel ready to begin. CP: I do not have internet in my studio at home. I don't even bring the cell phone in unless I really know that I will have to take a call and then I hate that is in there because it is a distraction. During my residency here at Omi I have my computer in the studio because I know that emails are coming in and that is not good. MCR: It is so hard to ignore. The chemical response in the brain from constantly checking email and Facebook is similar to compulsive drug use.
CP: Yeah, instant gratification. Also, you never know, you might have won something. But then there is also such a drag when you get an email that is awful. It just wears on you. You never know if it is going to be good or bad, but you are really lured into it. MCR: Also, people expect to be able to reach you all of the time. CP: They do get really bothered. I am better about it now that I actually take a phone around with me for the most part. My partner did not get a cell phone until this past year. Even I would get annoyed because I would be trying to reach him, but his answer was that if there was an emergency it wouldn't do any good to call him unless he was nearby. I thought that was a fair point. I tell the students to try to live without their electronic things for a couple of hours in the studio every day. Just turn them off or better yet, leave them behind so you’re not tempted to turn them back on. But people are not used to living completely by themselves for a couple hours at a time. They just aren't. MCR: It is interesting that you say that because during my trip here I was listening to an interview on NPR with acoustic ecologist and sound artist Gordon Hempton and he was saying how incredibly important silence is but also how uncomfortable it makes people because suddenly they are alone with themselves with nothing to distract them. The interviewer asked why that would be uncomfortable and he paused for several seconds before answering and she acknowledged that the silence brought on a wave of anxiety for her because she is so trained to try to fill that space, fill that void. CP: People ask me what I hope people will get from my work and in a way I just hope they get that pause. I want there to be a moment where the work catches them and they just breathe. It could just be a nanosecond but if they just breathe a little differently for that moment and then they could go back to their lives. MCR: It is easy to get lost in your work. I mentioned earlier that the forms have a sensual physicality to them and I was wondering how much your study of medical illustration has influenced your work. CP: I started college in chemistry pre-‐med. I liked how in chemistry you were given an unknown and you had to figure out the unknown. I liked how they used that word. I figured I would be a doctor because it seemed interesting and complex to figure out what is going on inside the body, so medical illustration made sense. I decided to go into art because chemistry didn't seem to have the creativity I was interested in. I realized I was more interested in something being unknown than figuring out what was the unknown. I met a woman who was an artist and I remember thinking that she was not anchored by any way of thinking and that appealed to me so I moved over to art. Being practical, I thought I would take up a degree in medical illustration. Growing up in Chicago, I would go to the Museum of Science and Industry and they had this “Lucite Lady” that was a transparent plastic Lucite sculpture on a stage. This is what kids are losing out on today because everything is so technologically advanced that there is no magic in anything. They actually undid these curtains and there must have been 300 6th graders in the audience and the lady’s stomach would light up and a disembodied voice would say, “this is my stomach” and then she would talk about her stomach. I was amazed and terrified to think that I could look inside her body and know what was going on. It was really magical and strange and bizarre like some sort of strange goddess thing. I don't know what was going on in my mind, but it really helped me. Nobody would think anything today about something like that because they would think it was poorly done, but it was a real achievement back then. MCR: In what other ways did growing up in Chicago influence your direction in life? CP: I was raised in South Side Chicago, which was working class but had great museums. Having access to the museums was important, but a typical day in my family was pretty much get up and go to work or go
to school and it seemed like most nights we would go to church, so there wasn't a lot of culture in that sense. Being raised in the church, you go to church almost every day. My world centered around that. Being in the Midwest perpetuates a certain idea of work ethic. You make sure you take care of things. You take care of your yard and your house. You make sure you know how to do these things. There is a practicality of maintaining life that you get in the Midwest. MCR: And now you have lived in South Florida for many years. Has that changed your work or changed you as a person? CP: I have lived in South Florida for 13 years now. The best thing about the Midwest is sincerity. I went to graduate school at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa and I had no idea about irony. I was so sincere. I was dead earnest to try to make something meaningful or beautiful or something that was worthy of something. And then to find out the whole time I am in graduate school everybody is being ironic. It is very funny. I didn't understand about commodification until I moved to Miami. I didn't understand about markets and the big A art world. I lived in this little luxury world of teaching at a university in Iowa and thinking it was about community and making the best art you can and reading. Then I went to Florida and there is a lot of wealth and excess and they have the big Art Basel Miami art fair. That was a complete eye opener and it has been very interesting and I have learned a lot about different cultures. South Florida is much more multicultural than Ames, Iowa. Florida has been great in many ways. I have had to navigate Miami and gallery representation and learn what it means to be in a gallery and produce for market and have your work in art fairs and be seen in that way. These are things I never thought I would have to contend with. I have to remind myself when I get really anxious about my work out there in the world that this is not why I got into art in the first place. I got into art to figure things out and not to be anxious about whether they are going to get reviewed in Art in America. MCR: That is hard to resist thought, isn't it? CP: Oh yeah. It is because there are people around you doing these things and I think you have a responsibility to your work to get it out there, so you can't be stupid about that. Another aspect of growing up in the Midwest is that you are raised to not boast or promote yourself and somehow if you work hard enough people will appreciate you. Then you come to learn that is not how it works. So you realize that you need to speak up for your work and if you are not willing to speak up for yourself okay, but for your work you have that responsibility. So I have gotten much better at speaking up so that my work has the opportunity that it needs to become better. That is why I came here for the Omi residency and why I took a Creative Capitol workshop. I have mixed feelings about their approach. Yes, they are very pragmatic and they say you cannot just live in your studio and think that things are going to happen; they are not. This is a very fast-‐paced world and you've got to get your work out there and ask for what your work is worth. So there is an emphasis on the work and I think that is where I really came to terms with it. Yes, you are responsible for your work. You are not just promoting yourself, you are promoting your work. Once you separate that, you will have a much easier time with it. If I think my work deserves to be made then I should make an effort to have it be seen. So that is what I have accepted, but I have difficulty with other areas. They tell you to ask people to help you. MCR: Are you able to apply those lessons wherever you are? If you are dealing with someone in the Midwest do you slip back into your non-‐self promoting identity or are you able to push forward and promote yourself because you owe it to your work? CP: It is not a habit for me to do it so I have to rally myself and I say, “Yes, you can do this. You can go approach that person or you can send that email.” It is hard, but I have been really fortunate as an artist because my work has received a lot of opportunities just by being seen. For example, you called me up to plan a show years after having seen my work. That is the situation I am most comfortable with and it has worked really well for me in a large part.
MCR: I arrived in Jacksonville in August of 2007 and saw your work within my first two weeks there. It was one of the first experiences in a place I have great affection for and it stayed with me and I have followed your career and shown your work to my students over the last six years. You should never feel embarrassed about promoting your work because you work so hard. People who don't work that hard and push the success of the work that they didn't work hard on maybe ought to feel a little shame, but you are putting in over 60 hours per week on your work. I still don’t understand how you do that while maintaining a full time professorship. CP: I have been fortunate. Opportunities come my way. I do make myself apply for things though. I applied for this residency at Omi and for the Kohler Artist in Industry residency. I am on sabbatical this year, which makes a huge difference, but I have become very efficient and I have also learned to say to my students that I trust that they can solve things. The best thing that I have ever learned as a teacher is that I don't have to solve things for them. I have to give them tools and I have to give them encouragement and gently point them in directions that might be useful for them but then I must let them know I actually trust that they can figure it out; that is the best thing that I have learned. It saves me a ton of energy to not be solving all of their problems. It is good for them because they step it up and artists have to be problem solvers. I just say to them, “Oh I think you can figure this out.” As a working artist I must protect time for my own work and that makes me a good model for them. So yeah, I found a much better balance. I am pretty efficient. MCR: You have to be I guess. While we are on that topic, what other advice do you have for young artists? CP: Trust your gut. Learn the skills necessary to make it the best you can. Love what you do, have passion for what you do. If you can walk away from art, then you should. MCR: That is a painful question to consider, especially if you are about to receive a degree in art, but that is a critical question, especially for those not fully applying themselves. CP: Yes, because there are much easier ways to get through life. On the other hand if a young artist cannot walk away from it then they have to come to terms with that fact and accept this life and give it everything they can and be happy about that and not get bitter and cynical because they want what others have. You've got to just trust that the work deserves to exist and do the best that you can and you know, be professional to get your work out there but I think what makes me sad is that so many artists get so bitter and disappointed about their level of success and I don't think it is good for the work. MCR: What does it mean to be a professional in this business? CP: You respect your work enough that you document it appropriately and can speak coherently about what you are doing if somebody were to ask you. You also must respect the work enough to make it as well as you can. So that means no warped stretchers. You must give your work the respect it deserves and that means all of the things necessary to make your work do what it needs to do when it goes out there because nobody should be making this stuff to put in a closet. If you want your work to be seen, you have to make sure it is ready to be seen. It is all about how the work looks, not how the artist looks. If you’re trying to dress like an artist then you have a problem. When I came here to New York for the Omi residency I was expecting more hipsters and tattoos but no, there are 31 artists and everyone looks as normal as I do. Most successful artists that I know are professional in the same way that a lawyer is professional. They show up for work, they put their time in, they do what it takes to stay connected with the art profession, they answer emails, if somebody asks them for images they have the images ready to send them. That is part of the profession of art. MCR: Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, right?
CP: Exactly. If a newspaper is going to do an article and they want images but you don’t have them ready then some other artist is going to have their images published. It is that simple. MCR: Speaking of art professionals, who are your artistic heroes? CP: Agnes Martin is a big hero of mine. I love her work and I think all art students should read her writings because they are so beautiful and generous. I am interested in shimmer in my work and I remember the first time I saw one of her paintings; it was called “Milk River” and it had thin lines of white and red but from far back it was like this vibrating, barely perceptible painting. I liked the idea that red was like blood and white was like milk; two bodily fluids that sustain life and when you look at the painting up close you see that she drew these thin red lines through the white field. It was so beautiful. And, of course Ann Hamilton also. I admire the rigor of her thinking, the generosity of her work and also sometimes the humor in it. When you hear her speak you just want to go home and make art. She makes you love art again. She is so brilliant and in her work there is nothing jaded or cynical or ungenerous. Her work is always a gift. It is beautiful. There are so many artists that I admire. I love Judy Pfaff’s work because she makes these environments with lights and complexities and symmetries and the movement from symmetry, which is something I want to learn from her because her worlds explode into other kinds of worlds. I like how open she is with form. Also, William Kentridge is someone I admire. His work is so brilliant, powerful, and beautiful. He is always investigating new ways of doing things and having fun with putting things together. His work is deadly serious but he gives himself a good time figuring things out with it. MCR: Well, thank you Carol. I have really enjoyed speaking with you about your work. It is an honor to host an exhibition of your work at York College. CP: And thank you. You have made this easy for me.