“Don’t listen to Marge!” my grandmother told Terry Dintenfass when she was considering marrying Hal Laufman and my mother objected.
When asked for his response, Phil critiques a problem line or curve. But the solution is usually not what looks wrong, bur the plane ahead or behind, its direction, speed, sharpness, roundness or tilt, pressure, all those variables.
My dad also would also point to one thing, usually an inside corner that wasn’t working.
At some point I gathered that the one thing that didn’t work was also what made the art its own.
My teachers led me to understand that advice was to be interpreted and chosen. The headmistress of my school, Joan S. McMeniman, with whom I talked practically weekly in my position as President of the Student Council in my Senior year at Nightingale, would see me in the hallway and intone, “Priorities, Kathy. Priorities.”
At NYSS, Bruce Gagnier talked on the importance of working from within a form. I wasn’t in his class, it was something I overheard as he talked to his students.
Garth Evans asked me to look back and remember.
What I learned and wanted to do was make a sculpture from many points of view. This seemed to be my received wisdom. Teachers either tired to “break me” of it, as that Cornell sculptor Jack Squier wanted me to only follow his method of measuring and computing. Tutelage. Making, Experimenting and Recreating would be the path which education goads us. And now I’m back to what I’d always wanted to do and was fought by NYSS sculptors Garth Evans and Bruce Gagnier to let go of what I know and experiment with a more primitive not-knowing. Either start from zero and add-on, then cultivate and prune, or start new each time, one hand behind back, standing on one foot, eyes closed.
Cut and Fill. Move around, up and down, and back and forth. Different materials—point line plane gesture.
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