On Wednesday, November 20 from 6-9 PM, I’ll be a panelist in a discussion about—what else?— “Saving Space for the Arts in Seattle,” which is part of The Evergrey series, Setting the Table. After the usual Q & A lineup, the discussion continues more casually, over a meal prepared by local chef Justin Khanna of Voyager’s Table. The description from Evergrey:

Seattle’s history is rich with creative minds who made an impact — from larger than life icons like Jimi Hendrix, Octavia Butler, and Dale Chihuly to our communities of indigenous artists, scrappy trendsetters, counter-culture envelope pushers and more.

Today, Seattle’s rapid growth often looks better suited to our booming tech industry than to creative cultures that have kept us vibrant, authentic, and oh yes — just the right kind of weird.

At this month’s Setting The Table, our community panel and dinner will dive into the Seattle arts ecosystem to try to understand: What led us to where we are today in our arts scene? And how we can build a more inclusive, supportive future for our local creatives?

Led by moderator Caitlin Moran from The Evergrey, local thought leaders will begin the conversation by answering your questions, and we’ll see where we go from there! Our discussion leaders for this month’s topic are:

• Priya Frank – Community Programs, Seattle Art Museum
• Jane Richlovsky – Seattle Painter and Accidental Developer
• Hallie Kuperman – Owner, Century Ballroom
• Greg Lundgren – Art Space Curator and Entrepreneur

 

The discussion and feast will take place at Makers Workspaces, 92 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121.

Tickets are available here. The event is $40 including the tasting menu. A limited number of reduced-price tickets are set aside; there is a link to apply for them on the event website.

Last month I had a nice chat with Jeffrey D. Shulman, a professor at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, on his Seattle Growth Podcast. In Season 6, he’s focusing on how people find and build community in a changing city. We mostly talked about ’57 Biscayne in 2011 and the Good Arts Building, and how those interlocking communities were formed and what I learned along the way. Of course, he also asks the inevitable “how has Seattle changed?” I’ve been here almost thirty years, but since I am rather ornery, I talked instead about what’s managed to stay the same. There are two interviews in the episode; the first one is interesting, but if you want to skip to mine, it starts at 33:44.

I also was a guest on the show a few years ago, along with my Good Arts partners Ali Ghambari and Greg Smith. We described how we came together from very different perspectives to create the wonder that is the Good Arts Building. Jeff had interviewed us separately and used the interview with Greg in one episode. He was about to scrap the rest, when the 2016 election happened. He felt like he really, really needed a heart-warming story of people setting aside their differences to work together to do good in the world—that’s us!—so he produced a Very Special Episode out of the outtakes.

“When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money.”

Oscar Wilde

You can’t get through an art opening without having some version of this conversation: Rents are going through the roof as the tech bros take over “our” city, displacing the artists who made it cool in the first place. In this telling, we artists are the inevitable victims of–and bait for–gentrification, unless someone else comes to our rescue. We can’t rescue ourselves because that wouldn’t be very artistic of us.

The romantic stock character of the impractical starving has persisted in the popular consciousness since the Renaissance. It really found its legs in the nineteenth century, with the publication of Henri Murger’s Scenes from the Life of Bohemia, a tale about artists and their struggle to pay the rent, since reprised in many familiar incarnations. Artists themselves internalize the stereotype, however silly, as if we have an investment in being marginal and easily displaced. We’re often rewarded for it, too: The most press I ever received was for being evicted; the amount of ink devoted to art itself is paltry in comparison.

Once you let go of this colorful yet ultimately defeating story of the artist as a victim, it becomes possible to write alternative endings to the gentrification narrative. Artists are actually rich–in educational privilege, political cache and creativity– and could use that wealth to find ways to stay, instead of finding yet another marginal neighborhood to move into. I did. With some of my neighbors from the former 619 Western building, I  started ’57 Biscayne studios, and a few years later partnered with a developer to make them a permanent fixture. I’m going to be talking about all of it this Friday at the Bainbridge Art Museum.

I’ll unpack the myth of the “Tortured Artist” as it manifested in the twenty-first-century media coverage of my own studio eviction, tell how some of us wrote a different story, followed by a discussion of what that might mean to the numerous cities and towns facing growth and the displacement of culture. The program is free and open to the public, as part of Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau.

Time to fess up: I became a painter partly to escape the clutches of an anarchistic theatre collective which had come to resemble the authoritarian structures that it mocked. The idea of spending hours and hours alone in a studio mixing paint seemed preferable to spending hours and hours in meetings arguing about who resembled which authoritarian structure. That was thirty years ago, and I still prefer the alone-in-the-studio scenario. About twenty years after parting ways with the theatre and a cross-country move, I started teaching life drawing to set and costume design students. Neither they nor my colleagues were aware of my shady thespian past (until now!). What makes this teaching gig a delightful one, among other things, is that I get to escape the visual art world, which I find a bit stuffy and to which I’ve never really acclimated. The irony of course is that I’m now hiding out in the theatre department, bringing my creative life, and my habitual contrariness, full circle.

One thing I’ve learned from all this genre-hopping is that visual storytelling is visual storytelling. Sometimes it’s on a stage, and sometimes it’s on a canvas (or maybe just on a napkin in a bar). In both the visual artifact and the live performance you have, basically, characters in some kind of a setting. How they are arranged and posed in their places tells you some, most, or perhaps all, of their story. Playwrights and novelists will undoubtedly quibble, but even words are just a version of a canvas, leaving spaces in between the words for you to fill in from your own imagination.

Every year my drawing class spends most of our first quarter learning how the character, the person part of the story is constructed, how to separate what we think we know about people from how they actually look, studying human anatomy, learning to discern the shapes and forms and lights and darks. After about ten weeks of this we begin to venture out of the studio, plop a person in a setting, and see what stories arise from the collision and collaboration of model, place, artists, and even passersby.

What I’ve also learned from years of teaching this class (and other plein air classes), is how many fabulous underutilized spaces there are in a city, open to the public, with unexpected views and sometimes even tables and chairs. At the Washington State Convention & Trade Center, we had most of two food courts to ourselves, ensconced in majestic corporate modern architecture and interior landscaping, and overlooking freeway interchanges, parks, and city streets. Most people didn’t even notice the model posing perfectly still across the room from us.

Just outside the capitalist Convention Center is a socialist-brutalist-style wonder, the pragmatically-named  Freeway Park. A person dwarfed by the massive gray geometry evokes a narrative of isolation, of a cog in the bureaucratic machine, or perhaps a defector.

A few weeks later, it was onward to the toxic monument to Seattle’s industrial past and hippie present, Gasworks Park. Our lovely model chose a floor-length gown for the occasion.

The big open space gave everyone a chance to get really far away from the model, and place her in a sweeping, long view of the big green cartoonish hill and city in the farther distance.

The passersby who do notice that someone in their path is holding perfectly still perhaps ask themselves the same questions we ask as we compose our drawings: Why is this person in a long black dress standing on yonder green hill? Did she walk out of a formal occasion that went bad? Is she coming, going, lost? From the future, from the past?

The colors and compositional and material choices all put different spins on the answer.

There are also large, unnamed objects that frame a figure and the landscape and seem ready-made set pieces for our little plays.

Not all of our model/actors are human. We spent one morning among the creatures of the Woodland Park Zoo, some of whom obliged us by posing out in the open where we could draw them; others lolled like lumps in trees or ponds.

At the Olympic Sculpture Park, Richard Serra’s Wake is more like an opera set. The rusty undulating behemoths dwarf the human subject but also lend her a bit of their monumentality. One could squeeze more narrative out of the situation if the model were able to interact more closely with the piece, i.e., touch it, but the Seattle Art Museum frowns on that. I have it on good authority that the artist would disagree with that policy.

The format, the cropping, the scale, the feeling of air or claustrophobia, even the shade of red can be interpreted in wildly different ways.

Of course, no tour of Seattle is complete without the Jetsonian kitsch of the Space Needle. Being just downhill from it, most of us were able to fit the whole thing into our drawings from the low angle. It is itself a character, giving the human character someone to play off of.

Side projects with specific rules and formats are good for shaking up the old brain cells, and reinvigorating the artistic process. I have three pieces going right now that are not typical “Jane Paintings”, and all of them happen to be square. Two of the squares are from a show of my own making, and I’ve roped in a passel of other artists to join me in the madness. (Read about the third square here.)

Music has always been my painting muse, and a source of inspiration and comfort long before I was a painter. I was even a radio DJ when I was a student at the University of Chicago in the 1980’s. We spun records then, and not quaintly or ironically, either. There was a sizeable room at the station stacked floor-to-ceiling with record albums  (I do hope it’s still there) to sift through before your show started. Sometimes I’d pick something out solely because I liked the cover.

The cover! They all had covers! Nice, generous, roomy, 144 square inches of loveliness or weirdness or creepiness or bad art or good art. But they always gave a little hint about what was on the inside. So when the Upstream Music Fest approached the Good Arts Building owners last year about hosting a music venue this May, I knew that I wanted to curate a visual art show inside the venue, and I knew exactly what it would be . . .

ORIGINAL HITS BY ORIGINAL ARTISTS!

I invited a bunch of artists–friends, Biscayne regulars, people whose sensibility seemed to fit the project–to create fake album covers for imaginary bands. And approximately 33-1/3 of them said yes, so now we are going to have a show. It opens Thursday, May 4, at 108 Cherry Street, on the first floor of the Good Arts Building, right next to the entrance to the studios.  During the Upstream Fest, May 11-13, we’ll have free live music on site from 4-8 PM, so one can feast ears and eyes at the same time. The show will also be open May 18, 19, 25, and 26 from 1-6 PM, and by appointment.

My instinct is to keep the album covers, particularly the band names, both my own and others’, under wraps until the opening. But a few images from the process of creating them can keep you guessing.

Bonus fun fact: Album Cover Art by a Famous Artist

Sure, we all know about Andy Warhol’s screenprinted banana, but fewer people are aware of Salvador Dali’s contribution to the genre. I don’t know if he’s responsible for the typeface, too, but it’s rather satisfying.

The studio is full of new works in progress as I get ready for three December shows, all of them in my neighborhood, for once. I’ll have several pieces in Linda Hodges Gallery’s What’s the Story, a collection of oblique and unresolvable narratives, where I’ll be keeping company with the likes of Gaylen Hansen, Jed Dunkerley, Ryan Weatherly, Polina Tereshina, Morgan Walker, among others.

The opening will be held on First Thursday, December 1st, as will the annual ’57 Biscayne Holiday Open Studio Shindig. My studio will be open and tended by the ever-fabulous Amanda James Parker, while I run back and forth like a maniac between Pioneer Square venues.

But wait there’s more! Zinc Contemporary, just a few blocks away, will also be having a just-in-time-for-the-holidays small works show, and I’m in that, too.

Big paintings, small paintings, drawings, watercolors, and even a few screenprints of mine will be scattered about the Square. It’ll be like a treasure hunt.