I'm trying to come up with a concise, digestible answer I can give when asked that kind but dreaded phrase, "what are you working on now?". There's the simple, factual response: "I'm making a quilted cemetery." This elicits interest and, depending on the audience, either excitement or polite bemusement. Either way, there are followup questions. In the moment, I have to decide how deep to dive - and I've never been great at thinking on my feet. So, the need for an elevator pitch.
First, to define the many threads that led me into this project - a difficult task on its own. I find great meaning in the past, both in my personal history and in human history at large. Walking through a cemetery, a record of decades or centuries of human life, and then stopping to read a particular gravestone, notice its neighbors, and place the person buried there in the context of their own life, is shrinking the macrocosm of human history down to a single person's life and death. When that person is a woman, and particularly when the grave is an old one, that headstone may be the only remaining marker of her life. The only clues to be read may be her date of death - often indicating a short life - and, often, the smaller graves surrounding her, memorials to children who led even shorter lives. The first grave I quilted was a replica of a woman's headstone from the 19th century. Zebiah died at 30, a few days after the birth of her son. His memorial, towering over hers, reveals that he died in the Civil War while still a teenager. Her husband, buried beside her, outlived both his wife and son by decades. That's a small and probably common story, and only a tiny piece of the devastating epic of the Civil War, but finding those small personal stories is what makes history feel real. It's not just a story - it really happened. I chose to recreate Zebiah's grave, not those of her husband and son, even though they give important context to her life, because hers is a story less told. That she clearly died as a consequence of childbirth is a potent reminder of why it is so important to fight for the reproductive rights that are being stripped from us today. It's also a fact of women's lives throughout history; walk through any old cemetery and the graves of women tell the same story. Before any understanding of medical hygiene childbirth was often a fatal experience, and before birth control it wasn't a matter of choice. A woman's duty was to marry and procreate. When she died, in childbirth or otherwise, the identifying marker on her grave would more often than not read simply, "Mother". I don't mean to say that motherhood isn't important; most graves, after all, are laid by surviving family members, and indicate the deceased's relationship to them. But I do find it striking that these women's primary identities are also, often, the thing that killed them. I've gone down a rabbit hole. More things I love about cemeteries: To walk alone in a cemetery is to be solitary and in community at the same time. This became especially apparent to me during COVID, when we were all isolating. I'm a hermit and homebody and I expected to find isolation easy; and, in some ways, it was. I relished the lack of pressure to socialize and the absence of disapproval around staying home all day. But what I missed were general communal experiences: sitting in coffeeshops, going to movies, eating in restaurants. Being with people without needing to interact with them. In a weird way, I filled this need by going to cemeteries. The quiet continuity of a few hundred years of human life, gathered together in a beautiful green space, was calming and human. How does this all connect to quilting? A few days ago I read a piece of writing by a quilter that resonated with me. She posted a picture of a beautiful hand-sewed quilt lying on a bed. She explained that years ago, her husband built the bed, meaning for it to be a family heirloom to be passed down, and she had always wanted to make a quilt to accompany the bed. She described the act of hand-sewing the quilt, with the intention of passing it to future generations, as an act of radical hope in this moment when it feels like the world is crumbling around us. To spend so much time on something destined for future generations is to make a tangible expression of the belief that those generations will exist, that somehow we will endure. If cemeteries are a line into the past, a connection to our history, and we look at quilting as an extension into the future, then we, the creators, are placed in the center of a continuing thread. I find looking in both directions along this line comforting - back into the past, to be reminded that this has all happened before, and forward into an uncertain future, with the hope that someday another person will exist to derive the same comfort from me. The idea of an heirloom is also powerful to me, both as a maker of future heirlooms and a receiver of those from my family. I come from a long line of makers and have in my possession quilts, knitted objects, and weavings made by my mother, my grandmothers, and their forebears. I've been to museums and seen quilts made by anonymous women, enslaved women, and women whose names are only known because they signed their quilts. How many of the women in my local cemetery, buried only with the marker "mother", also left behind handiwork, the only creative outlet in what was often a hard and unfulfilled life? How often is a beautiful anonymous quilt hanging on the wall of a museum the only remnant of a woman's life beside her gravestone? And then there is the matter of being an American, and Jewish. While quilting exists throughout the world, it has a particular tradition in American culture. A lot of this is tied, inextricably, to the cotton industry and this country's history of enslavement. Quilting as a creative outlet for black Americans has created some of the most beautiful examples of the art form, from Gee's Bend through to contemporary quilters like Faith Ringold and Bisa Butler. As with much of American history, it's a fraught subject that is sometimes hard to grapple with directly as a white person - but a necessary one. (More on this later - I'm taking a quilt history class soon!) Quilting is, however, not a part of Jewish history - at least not for the Jews of Eastern Europe, from whom I am descended. Articles I've read suggest this may stem from the poverty and lack of free time amongst Jewish peasant women. This doesn't really track for me - similar issues plagued rural America in the 19th and 20th centuries, and quilting was in fact a way to address them, reusing materials over and over - but what does seem likely is that wool, not cotton, was the primary material available in Eastern Europe, and therefore weaving and knitting were the crafts generally employed. I have no idea if my European ancestors quilted, but I've read of some Jewish women who, upon immigrating to America, took up the craft as a way to assimilate into their new culture. My Jewish grandmother, a second-generation American, is a master craftswoman. This, too, ties into cemeteries. At least where I live, in New England, most cemeteries are heavily Christian, gravestones replete with crosses and bible verses. Occasionally a small corner is dedicated to the Jewish dead. Incorporating my Jewish identity into some of the quilts I make is a way of merging my American-ness with my Jewish roots. If I kept writing I would probably come up with more threads to tie into the ever-tangling knot that is my inspiration, but I'll stop now. To try to synthesize what I've said here in a few brief phrases: I'm creating a cemetery of graves, mostly women's graves, and using the medium of quilting, traditionally "women's work", because my perspective is filtered through the gaze of being a woman in the world - what it has meant historically and what it might mean in the future. When it's all too clear that we are living through a dark period in history, is it possible to look back towards the past, witnessing our mistakes and acknowledging our predecessors, and then to look forward and make something destined for the future, expressing hope and belief that our descendants will survive to look back to us? Graves are heirlooms of the past - quilts are heirlooms for the future. I'm trying to make a space that rests on the point where those two timelines meet.
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I've got a million different things on the burner right now, including close to a dozen half-painted canvases clogging my studio - some started as long ago as 2013! But there are a couple of more recent works occupying me right now. Though I consider myself primarily a portraitist (insofar as I can consider myself anything after not working for four years [must stop beating myself up!]) I've been branching out into other styles lately. What amazes me about abstract artists is how they manage to create non-representational works that mean something specific - and how utterly I fail to do so when I try. To me, abstract art is like poetry, completely out of reach - it's like being on a huge, windy plain, with no fences or walls or anything to guide me. How can anything mean something when anything could mean EVERYTHING? So, perhaps abstract art is not for me. Although I can't shake the sense that if I ever really sorted myself out, I could find it. Another subject matter - landscapes. I used to find them, almost without exception, deadly boring. I could appreciate Canaletto's perfectly sparkling Venetian scenes, and of course Winslow Homer appealed to my New England nature, but most other offerings I found lacking. In college I took an art history class on Romanticism, it being the only one offered that term. It was fascinating to be confronted with the knowledge that I just hadn't been looking closely enough. Caspar David Friedrich, for example, painted fairly dreary paintings of ruined churches overrun by twisting vines and huge, lurking trees. Grey, dead scenes. I was taught to look beyond the basic, to see that by choosing this subject matter Friedrich was making a comment on the fragility of man and his beliefs, and the all-consuming power of nature and time. I loved it. Then I forgot about it for almost ten years. For the past few months, I've been engaged in researching and writing about the evolution of Romanticism in art and how it applies to the modern day. To that end, I've been trying my hand at landscape painting, tweaking to fit my thesis - that the modern translation of Romantic sensibility is the art of the disaster movie. That's just a detail of a larger work that will hopefully be finished in the next month! As for what I'm writing… who knows if it will ever be done.
The other painting I'm working on is right in my wheelhouse, a portrait based on a beloved movie. It's a wedding gift for a friend, so I'll keep it under wraps for now, but expect to see it soon! It's overhaul time!
This space has been dark for a few years, as the one or two people who check regularly may have noticed. I haven't had much time for art in the past few years, which in the deepest, hidden recesses of one's mind leads to the undesirable question, "are you really an artist at all?" I made a conscious decision recently to get back into it all. Life and location changes mean that I finally have the time, and four years of brain rattlings mean that I have a surfeit of wacky ideas just waiting to erupt into PURE GENIUS. Check back in the next few months for new and exciting stuff! Good lord, I'm terrible at this! Well, I hope you got good and attached to the unique, inspiring nature of Portland, because I don't live there anymore! Once again I have relocated, this time to Washington, D.C. It's on the cusp of spring here, and with the coming of the cherry blossoms I hope to be ensconced in my own apartment, but at this point I'm staying with my lovely grandmother. All my art supplies (and books, and movies, and CORN HOLDERS) are locked up tight in a storage space in Baltimore, which wasn't bothering me much (except when I tried to eat corn on the cob) until today, when I went to the National Gallery. Besides the much-touted Gauguin show, which didn't really wow me, I had a transcendent experience. (My favorite Gauguin painting, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and everything else pales in comparison.) I saw several Jasper Johns, three beautiful Rothkos, a couple of amazing Matisses, and a whole room of Calder sculptures that were each lit from several sources, so they cast double and triple shadows in the coolest way! I also bought a book about Lichtenstein, because I always like his work and feel like I should know more about it, since he dealt so heavily in borrowed imagery and "non-art." In fact, on the inside cover of the book I bought is this quote:
"All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons." Well, that pretty much says it! This whole day is turning me into an idea machine. I'm going to have to go borrow a pencil and some printer paper from my grandmother, even my SKETCHBOOKS are locked away in storage! This is torture! One lovely thing is that one of my Christmas presents this year was an extremely generous gift certificate to Utrecht, so as soon as I have the space I'm going to go buy some BIG canvases. I'm sick of making minute paintings! Time to make some windows you could step through. I always wanted to be an artist. Sadly, there was no Picasso-level precocity, but I certainly spent a large part of my childhood creating. My parents were incredibly supportive, as was my first art teacher, Pam Golden. She was my teacher for ten years, and she left me with three indelible beliefs.
1: There is no such thing as a mistake in art. Well, of course there is - I'm not happy when I drop a glob of paint on a finished surface. But every mistake leads to something else. Mistakes are discoveries. This lesson was drilled into me at a very young age and I surrendered to it completely. It's the lens through which I view my whole life. It gives me permission to do stupid things like quit my job and move to a new city with no prospects. How's that working out, you ask? Well, I'm still alive! 2. Spirals are meaningful. Pam was crazy about spirals, and this communicated itself to me. I mentally link my Montessori education with spirals. They're aesthetically pleasing, of course, but they're also labyrinths, mazes. They're both simple and complicated. Drawing a spiral can become an act of meditation, a small movement that smoothly grows, a ripple. They're mandala-like. 3. Blue mascara is cool. All throughout my childhood I was mesmerized by Pam's blue mascara. She had very light red hair, and the awesome contrast of her blue lashes seemed to me the essence of bohemian artiness. I don't wear makeup often, but the only mascara I own is blue. I was going to go on to talk about college, but this has gotten too long! Part two will have to come later. Here I am in Portland. It's a very nice city, with incredibly pleasant weather, so don't believe what people tell you! This summer has been a succession of perfect, cloudless 85 degree days, which I occasionally dip my toes into in the form of a stroll through Mt. Tabor park, a diminuitive former volcano which now provides encouraging vistas of Portland's water sources. More often, I huddle inside, crocheting and trying to convince myself to pick up a brush.
Yes, I'm once again feeling the artist's version of writer's block. Some things never change. Luckily, I've managed to convince myself that my former procrastinatory pasttime, crocheting, can be a form of art! I've always loved "outsider art" - check out the Baltimore Museum of Visionary Art if you're there, it's incredible! - and I especially like those crazy people who treat crafts as though they're art. Crafts are generally looked down on by the art community, although I think this is changing - Ghada Amer is one example of a celebrated fine artist who has integrated a "craft" - embroidery - into her art very successfully. I've even seen examples of artists who have worked with crochet - Patricia Waller and Shauna Richardson are two examples. Obviously, their work is in a very different vein from mine, but I'm still happy to see it. All the artists I've mentioned are women. I think it's a pretty straightforward statement for female artists to appropriate a traditional "woman's craft" and "misuse" it in some way - by creating gory stuffed animals or embroidering pornographic images. This was certainly in my mind when I began crocheting movie lines, although the "statement" I'm making isn't really something I want to say, but rather something I am. I like to crochet - I like movies that are traditionally marketed towards guys. This isn't because I'm a freak, but because Hollywood seems to think women can't enjoy a good explosion, and would rather see two insipid brides dye each other's hair blue. Untrue! She's All That is probably as close as I'll get to a "chick flick" quote. I try to pick quotations that actively clash with the medium of crochet, because it's more interesting, and because it's hilarious to crochet "fuck." I'm constantly paranoid that a little old grandma is going to come over and ask what I'm making. Ultimately, I'd like to combine these wall hangings with painting in some way. The Damien drawing with a crocheted frame is a tentative stab at that, though I don't think I'm quite there yet. I read Robert Rauschenberg's biography again, and I'm obsessed with combining EVERYTHING. But for now, I'm here. And look, it's sunny out again! Maybe I'll go to the park and crochet. It's been a while since I've written anything, and with good reason - I've been busy! I moved up to Portland, OR right after the holidays, and by now I'm fairly ensconced. I hated to leave my studio behind, but now that I'm working from home I'm getting a lot more accomplished! Except in the whole interacting-with-people aspect. I reorganized the site a bit, to make it less cluttered, and I put up a bunch of new art.
The photos are something I started working on very recently. For pure laziness' sake, I'll just cut and paste a paragraph out of my artist statement: The photographs Julia uses in her series are all of strangers. She finds them in junk stores and antique malls, abandoned or lost by the people who once treasured them. By altering them she gives them new context, invents a new story for them to tell. She reuses images, often recognizable, from old entertainment magazines because she enjoys the private preconceptions that people connect with images they recognize. Anyone looking at one of her photographs can create his or her own story, and someone whose image was lost in the bottom of a filing cabinet gets to live a new life. Borrowed imagery is something that really appeals to me, which is why I've really been getting into pop art and post-abstract-expressionism lately. I read biographies of Warhol and Rauschenberg, both of course incredibly interesting artists, if intimidating in their total brilliance. But I want my stuff to be a little more personal than theirs. There aren't really any movements anymore. Everyone does their own thing, and mine is pretty autobiographical, even if I'm appropriating images that belong to the general public. The paintings are still pretty straight-up portraits. I'm thinking of sticking some collage in there, or some crochet, but right now I'm really enjoying the specific focus. If I don't paint a portrait of Commander Riker, who will? I want to make things with yarn. To begin with.
I'm sort of seesawing here, in terms of content. When I left college, it took me a year to even pick up a paintbrush. Part of that was circumstance, part was fear, part was overwhelmedness. Is that a word? It is now. College pulped me up and reformed me, art-wise. It opened my head up to a whole new woooorld of artistic possibility. However, with education comes a loss of spontaneity, innocence, I suppose, ease. The stuff that makes so much outsider art amazing. Not that I would consider myself an outsider artist before I went to Bennington. But I was shockingly ignorant about not only contemporary art, but most art post-impressionism. Any paintings and drawings I did were straight-up portraits or still-lives and I didn't think about the subject matter for a second. And I painted dozens of paintings throughout high school. In college, dumped into an environment of intense introspection and historical connotation and meaning, I didn't paint a single thing in four years that I care to look at now. So the first thing I painted after college (a year after college) was an acrylic painting of Zac Efron. I painted it in a day, on the floor of my den, while watching tv. And it galvanized me. It was so much fun! I haven't stopped producing art since. But at this point, after two years in Los Angeles, on the brink of moving to a strange new city and focusing on art full-time, I'm feeling once again a strange urge to be "meaningful." To think about what I'm painting. To create things that no one understands except me. To make things with yarn. I had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Back to the East Coast, where every cold sting of wind filled me with euphoria! Sure, it's nice to have blue skies 99% of the time, to never have to wonder what the temperature is, to still have a valet ticket from three months ago stuck in my windshield wiper because it NEVER RAINS (and I'm lazy). But California is just not for me. I enjoy weather too much. Besides, I haven't yet seen skies to rival the ones at home. In addition to wonderful family, incredibly delicious food, and gorgeous skies, I've seen a lot of wonderful art lately. I went gallery-hopping, which I should do more often, since it always makes me feel like certain things are possible. I saw paintings by Edward del Rosario, truly incredible. Certain things by Robert Williams I found terribly creepy, while others gave me a lot of ideas. Then I channeled Lindsay Lohan in that terrible luck movie. About to go home, I instead went into one more gallery on a whim. They happened to be having a show of Chagoya's recent work. That would be Chagoya, who has been, for several years, my favorite living artist. It was so awesome to suddenly stumble across this room filled with art of his that I had never seen before! It felt like magic. I felt so, so lucky. Especially because his work isn't all over the place - the only other time I've seen it in person is the first time I heard about him, I think in the art book room at the Clark, or the Williams College museum. A college printmaking trip. The art book room had something by him - if I remember correctly, one of his codexes. It's not even that easy to find images of his stuff online. So happening upon a gallery that represents him was huge. I bought a catalogue of his work.
So basically I've been thinking a lot about art, but not doing much! That will all change in the next week. I have a very busy month or so coming up, so I want to get as much art in this week as possible. Two new pieces are up! These paintings just flew together, proof of how quickly I can work when I'm really excited about what I'm doing. These continue the Star Trek theme; I recently discovered Wil Wheaton's delightful reviews of early TNG episodes and I guess I've been thinking a lot about that world and how much I love it. But I'm branching out! Besides the aforementioned Rubies, I've been working on some other tracings: I like working this way because I can bring my tracing paper home at night and draw while watching a movie or something, and then go into my studio the next morning and incorporate what I've drawn directly into a painting. It's a fast way of working, it gets across what I'm trying to get across, and it's stylistically more interesting than a straight painting. Now, I know what you're thinking (or what I'm thinking in my deepest subconscious): branching out? Why, Julia, you've already done a million Zac Efron paintings, Point Break paintings, and even a Ruby Keeler painting! What's next: another painting of your sister?
And in turn, I turn to myself and say, No! You don't understand! No one understands me! I'm building a LANGUAGE here! When I reference Point Break in a painting, for example, I'm really talking about brotherhood and the pain of love torn asunder. Zac Efron, in my ouvre, is the Christ figure, a paragon of perfection in imperfect times. Ruby Keeler could represent the innocence of times past.....a talentless, off-key, wooden-shoe-wearing emblem of times past. ....well, she COULD. If I really felt like explaining myself to myself. But I don't! So let's just say there are certain themes I like to return to again and again. Hitchcock had overbearing mothers - I have Point Break. |
Julia Cooper
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