My first food paintings were of eggs. Lots of eggs. Eggs distributed one to a plate, eggs enshrined in stainless steel bowls. I was working out, among other things, my angst-ridden resistance to the cult of motherhood and its reproductive mandate. I had just begun to pilfer 195o’s magazines for imagery, and at the time I was particularly struck by how busy all the ladies pictured in their pages were with countless projects —shining floors, whipping up cakes, contemplating their kitchen cupboards—but really, it all seemed to me to be just a sublimation of the main message: Their true and only purpose in life was to make more tiny Americans. It didn’t seem to me, in the 1990’s, that the message had altered much. It still doesn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On a visit home to Cleveland around this time, I asked Mary Beth, my very brilliant but troubled oldest sister, whether she would be attending the following day’s family Christmas gathering. She replied cryptically, “Of course I’m coming: I’m making . . .deviled eggs.” She slowly drew out the name of the favorite midwestern delicacy, lingering on the “devil”, imbuing it with a  significance I could only guess at. My cousin, an academic who is never at a loss for meaning, pointed out that perhaps here lay, in the humble deviled egg, my next subject matter. Take the egg—embodiment and symbol of the female’s power to create life—remove its core, fluff it up with mayonnaise and reassemble it into a decorative appetizer, a mere warmup to the main event of manly meatitude. The project of the patriarchy in a nutshell. Or eggshell.

I’m Making Deviled Eggs (1999) was something of a break-out painting. It won first prize in a juried show in 2000, which led to my first commercial gallery representation. It was the first time, after working in near-isolation for ten years, that I felt that my art was of interest to a wider world, the first hint that I could have a professional career at it, and maybe even one day make art full time. I had named the painting in an ironic nod to my sister’s cryptic quote. Mary Beth died in 2010 under rather unhappy circumstances. In retrospect, given what a pivotal moment this piece represents, artistically and professionally, I’m happy I did. It feels less ironic and more like an homage to a very smart woman born at the wrong time, whose potential, like that of the deviled eggs, was never fully realized.

I’ve since expanded the menu considerably, but I’m still drawn to those highly decorative concoctions that seem to be channeling an enormous amount of female creativity into bizarre and ephemeral projects. The theme of gutting something, mixing the innards with other ingredients, primarily mayonnaise, and stuffing them back into their original container to create a similacrum of the original—it recurs again and again. (Twice-baked potato, anyone?) It is, come to think of it, also an apt description of what I myself do with the ephemera of the American Dream.

My work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Face First at the Bainbridge Museum of Art, on lovely Bainbridge Island, Washington. Curated by Greg Robinson and Amy Sawyer,

Sleek shiny cars, gleaming ribbons of freeway, convenient modern handheld devices like TV remotes and light meters—we’re all nostalgic for the future that never happened.

My show of recent paintings on vintage fabrics, remixing images of mid-century car ads and real estate porn into dissections of the American unconscious, is up through this Friday, April 26 at Atelier Drome Architecture + Design, 112 Prefontaine Ave. S in Pioneer Square. Hours are 8AM- 5PM Monday through Friday.

Recommended by The Stranger as one of the top shows to see this spring.

I’ve recently had reason to go digging into the hundreds of old slides of my work that have accumulated over the years. It used to be, kids, that when you wanted to document a work of art, you had to take a photograph on actual film. You would take several photographs of each one, so you’d have lots of copies, some of which would inevitably be over- or underexposed, because you were hedging your bets and couldn’t preview them. You’d have to wait for them to return from the “film place” to find out if they were any good. Since you were shooting on positive film, the piece of film in the camera was the actual product you had to live with, no post-production edits possible.

For what purpose this insane ritual? To send away for rejection letters, of course. The more of these labor-intensive, little white plastic-framed squares of film you sent out, the more letters you could collect. I sent away for lots of them, so I have quite a collection.

Every foundation, arts commission, granting agency, juried show, commercial gallery or other rejection-letter producing facility would have its own precise requirements for how these things should be labeled, and no two sets of requirements were alike. Place a red dot in the upper left corner of the image. Place a red dot in the lower left corner of the image. Affix a typed label with the title of the piece, dimensions, artist’s name, date of work, medium, birthdate, methods, influences, previous grants applied for, brief description of the process. Place absolutely no labels or tape of any kind on the slide.

This, of course, meant that you had to remove all of your carefully typed or handwritten labels every time you got the slides mailed back to you (in the self-addressed-stamped-envelope, or SASE, that you also provided), and start all over again for the next application. It’s kind of remarkable that any painting got done at all. And even more remarkable is that I managed to eke out a few successful applications, occasionally collecting a check or two rather than the customary rejection letter. (Note: Never, EVER, count up the hours spent preparing the application and subtract that time from the amount of the grant. Just don’t.)

Recently, to complete a modern, electronic–yet still rather labor intensive–application to one of the rejection-letter facilities, I dug up twenty-odd years’ worth of slides and had them scanned to digital files. The accompanying narrative required me to recap my entire artistic history, along with concurrent personal and professional history and other influences, from horse-drawing times to the present, thus provoking a full-blown midlife crisis.

These slides below are from the mid-nineties. I was still learning to paint, still learning how I paint, and, obviously from the subject matter, I was also an angry young feminist eager to slash some taboos. The fact that there are labels on them means I actually sent these babies out to someone in the stuffy art world. The thought of that initially made me cringe, but upon reflection, I gave my younger self a little credit for sheer cheekiness.

 

The egg phase came about in my early- to mid- thirties (when many of my peers were busily reproducing). I had surrounded myself with magazines from the nineteen fifties filled with little else except happy middle class housewives flanked by cherubic broods. The ads tout the wonders of consumer choice: look how many choices these ladies have! They have hundreds of choices of pastel shades of formica countertop. What they apparently didn’t have was the choice not to reproduce.

My ladies, appropriated from those ads and bent to my own purposes, spent a lot of time contemplating their eggs. Gazing at eggs, being vaguely threatened by eggs, fluffing eggs up into pretty deviled creations and displaying them for guests on the coffee table.