Since joining Facebook a few years ago, my primary interest has been networking with artists toward building community and learning what I can of the behind the scenes culture of the NY art world—as well as other major art centers throughout the world.
Having lived in several major cities then finding myself back in a small Oklahoma town caring for aging parents has been difficult and isolative. I was invited into Facebook by the artist, Robert Delford Brown, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Delford_Brown who became a personal friend after I met him through a search in 2006 of American performance artists. He was a wonderful and brilliant artist and man.
I am looking forward to dialoging with artists and thinkers with the intention of offering them opportunities to share their thoughts on their work and relevant subjects while also hopefully learning about their lives and the culture of their respective art communities. In spite of rising art centers throughout the world, New York remains the axis mundi.
In the past year I have maxed out the “5000 person Facebook limit” and the vast majority of my “facebook friends” are working professional artists.
Jeff Hogue
Farrell Brickhouse Conversation
space
(all of Ellison's works are untitled)
I don’t remember when I approached Lori Ellison to become friends, but in the last several months, through some sort of indefinable process, Lori’s posts of her original aphorisms, drawings and thoughtful comments have captured my imagination. Out of my 5000 contacts on Facebook, there has emerged a group of at most, a couple hundred that I have found myself encountering and noticing over and over.
I have cut and pasted my conversation with Lori from my Facebook messages. Lori is my first artist subject.
“HERE COMES THE SUN: LORI ELLISON AND SHARI MENDELSON' A certain visionary fervor infuses these two artists. Repeating units are favored to excellent effect, whether the transparent circles of plastic joined into sparkling screens and nebulae in Ms. Mendelson's work, or the fine fields of geometric or organic patterns in Ms. Ellison's paintings and drawings. Ms. Ellison deftly summons a mesmerizing power that compares quite favorably to that of Agnes Martin, James Siena and aboriginal or tantric art; it suggests that she may be some kind of genius.”
Roberta Smith, NY Times 4/11/2008
Jeff Hogue
How are you? I'm thinking of doing some conversations with artists I've met through Facebook and posting them as interviews on a blog. Would you consider being my first? Do you have any recent photos of you I might include?
Lori Ellison
Jeff, I am doing fine - I am not comfortable being photographed so there aren't really any recent photos of me. I would like very much to participate in your conversations with artists project.
Jeff Hogue
I've followed you for a while now on FB and have fallen in love with your drawings and paintings. There's a contemplative and pleasantly obsessive quality to your work that I have always found alluring.
Tell me a little about your work as it is currently---and a bit about your process. How do you characterize any (assuming there are) distinctions you make between your drawing processes and your larger paintings?...and if these opening questions aren't a great starting point, please let me know...all is fodder...all is relevant.
Lori Ellison
My paintings are usually the same size as my drawings. I wrote an artist's statement On Modesty* which delved into why I choose to work small. I started making the ballpoint pen on notebook paper drawings right after graduate school where I had started to doodle motifs from my much larger paintings in my notebook during lectures and panel discussions. Many ideas for my drawings came from the paintings fed into my original drawings, then ideas for my paintings started to come from my drawings. And then there are the works that can only be drawings or paintings and resist any translation.
Jeff Hogue
I have often felt that smaller works on paper have a more ephemeral and intimate quality and that scale plays into this. Would you say this is true of your work? At what point did you choose to move to your currently smaller scale for your paintings? Your statement on "Modesty" sounds fascinating. Can you elaborate?
I found myself thinking of Joe Houston (who used to show at PPOW and is now the curator for the Hallmark Collection in KC) and his sentiments along these lines. He spoke once of the fact that in his mind, the world doesn't need more "images". He painted very small and carefully crafted paintings that felt almost sacred in their craft, delicacy and solitude. Do you think of your paintings and drawings as "delicate?"
Lori Ellison
They have been called delicate, but some are more muscular. I will send you the essay.
“Art that is the size and resonance of a haiku, quiet and solid as the ground beneath one's feet - not art that wears a monocle and boxing gloves in hopes of knocking other art out of the room.”
On Humility: Or Small Work
In Richmond, Virginia there once was a gallery named RAW for Richmond Artists Workshop that had an exhibition of many works entitled Small Art Goes directly to the Brain.
If one is lucky, Small Art goes directly to the heart. For this it must be humble and on a suitably modest scale - in this way some work can be crowned Great. (Golda Meir once said "don't be humble, you aren't that great.") To work with humility, one must acquire some of the practical virtues artist need: diligence, temperance, modesty, bravery, ardor, devotion and economy.
To work with humility it is better to strive for the communal if not the downright tribal; for wisdom in choices rather than cleverness; good humor in practice; and practice as daily habit. Phillip Guston famously said he went to work in his studio every single day because what if he did't and "that day the angel came"? Henry James once said, "We work in the dark, we give what we have, our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task." Doubt is humility after a long long apprenticeship.
Small works dance a clumsy tango with one's shadow. Huge works can ice skate over one's nerves, file under fingernails on a chalkboard - I can just hear the screeching.
If our work is so small and reticent that one doesn't enter the space of the painting, no mind - we just might be making work that enters straight into the viewer's chest. I am weary of art that tickles my forehead for an instant and is gone - I am looking for the kind that thrums in my chest and lodges there, in memory, like those souvenir phials of the air of Paris Duchamp proposed.
Proportion based on the lyric, not the epic - that is where the juice lives. Stirred, not shaken. Duchamp once said that art is the electricity that goes between the metal pole of the work of art and the viewer, and I don't need shock treatment. Art that is the size and resonance of a haiku, quiet and solid as the ground beneath one's feet - not art that wears a monocle and boxing gloves in hopes of knocking other art out of the room.
A discrete art, valiantly purified of the whole hotchpotch of artist's tricks and tics.
Jeff Hogue
I was thunderstruck by this painting. It seems to glimmer and move and there's a strange dimensional topography that defies it's graphic flatness.
Lori Ellison
That is the one Valerie chose for the postcard for my show! I don't know how I feel about it, I have done that motif many times and this one has some nice swirls in it...
Jeff Hogue
I've of course been thinking about you and your work. I've also been thinking of you in your general situation. I have prayed for you and have visualized you with white light around you and penetrating you.
I have a lot of personal concerns. I don't know for sure that you're not feeling a little on the spot with this as though my reaching out to you has been little more than a prelude to have access to you. I hope you feel and trust this is not the case. Having said all this, what suggestions do you have for me in furthering this interview?
Lori Ellison
No, I don't feel you have been untoward at all. I like being interviewed, it makes me clarify my thoughts - I write poetry as well so sometimes they may be too metaphoric for people.
Jeff Hogue
Let the metaphors come! I love your sensibilities...there's a rigor and a clarity that has come through with things you've said many times...which has been instructive for me...I tend to be too amorphous in my thoughts and celebrate clarity, even when it's juxtaposed with open ended mystery...and perhaps especially so. Thanks...So if I was a 10 year old boy and knew very little of art history or theory, how would you articulate and explain your work to me?
Jeff Hogue
You haven't responded. I was on my walk yesterday and thinking about this conversation and thought it perhaps in poor taste to ask you to explain your life's work to a 10 year old...perhaps too much is lost in simplistic verbalization. I feel that you've always taken a certain healthy pride in the precision and elegance of your ideas---and these ideas are simply too subtle and nuanced for conversations with 10 year old art neophytes...OK. In terms of a conversation around the purpose or non-purpose of art, are you one who sees a clear relationship between art and contemporary culture? Is there a responsibility among artists to attach their art making to the embrace of current sociopolitical issues---or do you feel that your impact on the world is less clear--yet equally valid perhaps?
Lori Ellison
We went out yesterday. I babysat for a living and drew with children who were inspired by my work and gave me some of their drawings which in turn inspired me. It was a joy to teach and to learn in this way and no words were needed. One 6 year old looked at one of my rope drawings and said "It's like a movie!" She did two amazing drawings another time and let me keep them.
Jeff Hogue
How wonderful!!!
Lori Ellison
I like Identity Politics and socially activist art and feel the backlash in the 90s was really an awful thing. I have said many times to abstract painter friends that I must be the only one nostalgic for the political art of the first half of the 90s - and they confirm that I might be. I just can't do it myself.
Jeff Hogue
Interesting. Around that time I discovered the works of Suzie Gablik: "Has Modernism Failed," "The Reenchantment of Art" and Conversations Before the End of Time." I was so moved by her assessment of the "Art Industry" that I turned away from painting and only recently have reembraced it.
I ran across this somewhere,
"A painter, writer, and lifetime independent bookstore clerk (semi-retired), Ellison is also a voracious consumer of aphorists’ biographies, most recently of Mae West, Karl Kraus, and G.C. Lichtenberg. Her aphorisms have something of all three of these aphorists: West’s humor and Kraus and Lichtenberg’s smart, satirical sensibilities."
Are you conscious of a relationship between aphorisms you write and the beautiful and as Jerry Saltz recently characterized, "visionary" drawings and paintings you're known for? Your visual work seems pristine and independent of any sort of clear narrative. Would you agree?
Jeff Hogue
I just read your post, "Too varnished a style makes the eyes glaze over." I love this!
Lori Ellison
My aphorisms came out of my love of the literary. I wrote poems and journalism before I ever started painting. I don't know the relationship between these two but I do know I got Jerry curious about my work by sending him aphorisms every week for a while because they were requested by Rob Storr when I showed him my ballpoint pen drawings of my aphorisms, have done word art as well. James Siena bought two of my drawings the first time he saw them and one of them was a list of the books I had read in order from when I first moved to New York. I had been a bookstore clerk for so much of my life, because I love reading so much.
Jeff Hogue
Virus sick day...get back to you soon...hope you're feeling better than I am:(
Lori Ellison
I have no side effects or physical problems with my cancer yet. Get well soon! I have been enjoying this conversation/interview. Helps me clarify some things for myself.
Jeff Hogue
So glad. You are a joy.
Jeff Hogue
I felt a bit funny mentioning my rather minor woes...am back to normal today. A bit scattered right now playing catch up. Give me a while to contemplate our dialog and I will offer another question or two.
Jeff Hogue
I feel a consistent lightness of touch in your work. It feels that you really move beyond self-consciousness--as though your commitment pulls you somewhere beyond verbal spaces. Would you say this is true? I mean there's a very natural and free quality---unadorned and "modest" and I find the work consistently refreshing. I think it is the childlike quality---like Guston or Twombly that comes through for me. Are you at times aware of wanting to "say" more?
Lori Ellison
I believe in text free experiences.
Jeff Hogue
Well put. I have noticed the last couple days that this relatively minor stomach virus has really kicked up a lot of core fears and challenges. If I've seemed asleep at the wheel, perhaps this is why...
Lori Ellison
You haven't seemed asleep at the wheel one bit to me!
Jeff Hogue
What does it mean to you to have an important critic like Jerry Saltz assign such a label as “visionary”?
Lori Ellison
A lot! Spirituality has saved my life at crucial junctures. Like you, I have read Jung, Hillman and Thomas Moore, though not in depth. More about Jung in the book A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein. Sabina was called a genius in the book and she holds up to these two though her paper on the death instinct which was uncredited for changing Freud's way of thinking, and he subsumed her work into his. Interesting stories!
James Joyce took his schizophrenic daughter to Jung and Jung famously said when Joyce said “she writes like I do,” Jung replied, “You are swimming in the river and she is being carried along by it.” My younger brother had a schizophrenic break at 14. He is a really good writer and does amazing artwork that is on notebook paper, to my surprise when he came to NY to try to get his manuscript published. He just thinks of them as doodles, but would love to have a two-person show with him someday.
It is hard though to not be in a central city. I needed to come to NY - it pushed my work and my working habits.
Jeff Hogue
I think your point about working habits is extremely apropos. I suppose that part of the reason I approached you--and plan to approach others I respect is to begin to build some sort of meaningful dialog---with real artists...but I'm guarded about being seductive---I really want to explore YOUR ideas and feelings and work...
Jeff Hogue
"Ms. Ellison deftly summons a mesmerizing power that compares quite favorably to that of Agnes Martin, James Siena and aboriginal or tantric art; it suggests that she may be some kind of genius."
This struck me in terms of Roberta Smith’s mention of Martin who, though an obvious analogy, I had overlooked.
When I stumbled upon this (again) and considered my experiences with Agnes Martin, who is probably one of my 10 favorite artists of all time, I realized that this is quite true.
There is a quiet and stalwart sort of pride in her paintings that doesn't take pride too far...Her pride, as I feel is true of you, is in your devotion to your work...there's a rigor that comes to mind---yet a weightlessness that feels infinite yet almost metric.
Were you asked to meditate on Martin's work and give a short response, ultimately perhaps tying it to your work, what might you offer up?
Lori Ellison
...As for Agnes Martin, I was surprised by that coming from Roberta. I have felt Yayoi Kusama's works so much more.
Jeff Hogue
That's fascinating. Martin's work has a restraint and gravity (like yours) that I don't experience in Kusama's works...her work is brilliant but for me it's irreverent and whimsical...I just don't get that vibe from yours...hmmm...
Lori Ellison
Perhaps I'm different.
Jeff Hogue
So do you have misgivings about Martin's work--or simply a lack of resonance?
Lori Ellison
A found a lack of resonance, except for one older painting of hers with gold leaf, which I felt. I respect and admire her work and her writing. I was complimented beyond belief when Roberta Smith wrote that about me.
Jeff Hogue
NO DOUBT. It must feel incredibly reassuring to have important art intellectuals' endorsements...I think what inspires me the most about your work---or better, how I experience your work is that I sense this weird paradox between perched specificity and a sort of organic almost indigenous spontaneity. What do you say of the piece of yours that I posted and stated is my "favorite."
Lori Ellison
That is the one Valerie chose for the postcard for my show! I don't know how I feel about it, I have done that motif many times and this one has some nice swirls in it...
Jeff Hogue
Well, your portfolio is unlike some that I have to rifle through to find pleasing examples...I love the ones in the MOMA collection and how they present side by side---each with different motif's but tied together by hue. I've always had a special relationship to blues and you've used the color to a range of effects.
“I am looking for the kind [of art] that thrums in my chest and lodges there, in memory, like those souvenir phials of the air of Paris Duchamp proposed.”
For an extraordinarily well read wordsmith and aphorist, Lori Ellison’s visual work seems to be woven in a world cloaked in silence. Perhaps part of the allure of her exquisite drawings and paintings is attributable to her need for both worlds and the tension of their interplay. The artist, Stephen Fleming once remarked, “When you encounter a work of art and you just know in your gut that it's right, there’s the experience of the sublime.” The works of Lori Ellison occupy this space. Her sensitivity and intelligence merge with supple civility and commitment to truth to create simple yet often profoundly felt visual experiences. I am grateful to have found her work and to have had an opportunity to chat with her. Facebook can at times seem like a raging flood of human thoughts and information. I have found there to be a few islands of respite and peace. Lori Ellison is one such island.
A special thanks to my friend and editor, Dylan Brodie
links
James Kalm Lori Ellison at McKenzie Fine Art
http://ballpointphilosopher.blogspot.com/
