Amy Sillman
I have been looking for ways to approach an interoceptual understanding of the body through image making and I came across Sillman's work in Venice last year. It seemed to chime with some of the things I had been thinking about and then I discovered that she also writes about art, so I became even more interested. She also stated that, "I have really never understood myself as a painter, really I'm a drawer." I could almost say exactly the same thing, "I have really never understood myself as a sculptor, I'm really a drawer".
One of Amy Sillman's books
She also makes animations, so why had I never heard of her before? Her paintings are about forms and materials in flux, a process that when it operates well, allows you to work in a way that sits between one thing and another, thus avoiding that binary opposition problem, the thing/not thing issue that I have with nouns. I'm making some hybrid forms down in the studio at the moment and as I do I'm also trying to make things that visually oscillate between one thing and another.
Like myself she is also happy to work digitally, and she uses inkjet prints of her own drawings on canvas and then paints hand-made marks on top, a process I have looked at myself, however on paper rather than canvas. Painting is for her not a final product, but is a process. Again I concur. I like finding artists that have trodden a similar path, especially if they are a similar age to myself. It is as if there is some sort of zeitgeist in the air that you pick up and run with, no matter if you are in New York, Mumbai, Beijing, Lagos or Leeds. The reality is that the work done, wherever it is made, is as likely to be as authentic and have as much cultural value if it is made in Leeds as anywhere else. Art making is now a global concern, as Marshall McLuhan stated, we are now living in a global village.
Like myself she is also happy to work digitally, and she uses inkjet prints of her own drawings on canvas and then paints hand-made marks on top, a process I have looked at myself, however on paper rather than canvas. Painting is for her not a final product, but is a process. Again I concur. I like finding artists that have trodden a similar path, especially if they are a similar age to myself. It is as if there is some sort of zeitgeist in the air that you pick up and run with, no matter if you are in New York, Mumbai, Beijing, Lagos or Leeds. The reality is that the work done, wherever it is made, is as likely to be as authentic and have as much cultural value if it is made in Leeds as anywhere else. Art making is now a global concern, as Marshall McLuhan stated, we are now living in a global village.
Amy Sillman: From '40 Pink Drawings', 2015-16, acrylic, charcoal, and ink on paper: 76 × 57cm
In a press release for Sillman's work it was stated that, "Sillman’s images together are like sentences that speak in the timbre of drawing but wear a light jacket of painting". I wish I had thought of saying that, it suggests that as you put on that jacket to paint, you are also putting on a painter's uniform, suggesting that painting is a more formal occupation, with a lot of culltural history behind it. When drawing you can be much more informal and open to new discoveries. Sillman however also describes her practice as being really more like writing; she likes to slip between genres. You can get a much better idea of her practice from the videos below.
Amy Sillman
Amy Sillman
It is best to look at her work in sequences. The paintings and drawings above work like frames from an animation. I would really like to have a block of my own images framed up in a similar way, but I'm not sure whether I can afford it. I'm very aware that presentation is part and parcel of exhibiting work, but we have to also cut our cloth according to our means. Perhaps an animated sequence projected within an exhibition might deliver the idea just as powerfully as a framed set of images? I'm aware of several artists that have gone over budget when putting together exhibitions and in the long run I don't think it helps, as you end up scrimping and saving to meet the next month's bills and that often seems to put a halt to the amount of artwork being produced. It is sometimes useful to remember Maslow's hierarchy, if we are to achieve self-actualisation, we need to ensure that basic needs are in place first.
Some frame makers have a calculator on their site, see: https://www.easyframe.co.uk/picture-frames, which helps when trying to work out whether or not commercial framing is a possibility. On the other hand if you have the time and resources you can make your own. Sorry I'm digressing again.
Amy Sillman: Painting
When you look at her paintings, such as the one immediately above, it is clear that she is still when painting someone that draws, but she draws with the paint. The line becomes active as a colour and thus begins another story, the one where every mark is a colour and every ground an optically active surface. Every drawing is of course a coloured drawing (there are thousands of different blacks and whites and combinations there of) and every coloured drawing is in effect a painting. This takes us back into the trouble with nouns and hopefully if drawing is understood as a verb, it releases its identity out into a process and a process has no tight boundaries, all we have is therefore a becoming, each of Sillman's images is therefore a stage in an arrival that will also at some point also become a departure.
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