NATURE OR NURTURE
Me and my mother in the 1970s.
The nature/nurture question has been applied to artists at least as often as it has to athletes. And the verdict is still out. While I am distantly related to Stefan Lochner, a Northern European Gothic painter, his genes did not make an appearance in any of the intervening generations. As for nurture, there are some things in my background that, while not predictive, at least didn’t halt my development as an artist.
In 1953 my father decided he wanted to build two wooden sailboats for my brothers. “Bluejays”, as they were called, was a class of sailboats that were raced on Great South Bay, the body of water between Long Island and Fire Island, where we spent our summers. He planned to build them in the basement of our suburban house. My mother objected.— If you build them in the basement, I will never see you. So, it was decided. They emptied the living room of all its furniture and my father began constructing the two boats. Their hulls served as my playpen. I helped my father sand the decks of the boat, and learned the difference between the grades of sandpaper and the uses of wet and dry sanding. Once the boats were constructed, we taped off the waterline and painted the hull with marine epoxy, the bottom with copper paint, and the deck with varnish. The smell of paint and turpentine was intoxicating.
Me helping my father caulk the boat.
As the process proceeded through the winter, I watched as the creamy paint made thin threads of color as the brushes were lifted from the can, and later as it formed a skin, and finally as it dried and stuck to the bottom of the can. My father’s brushes, once new, became worn into the shape of the boat. Some were refined enough to aid in making a straight edge without tape. Unlike me, my father cared for his brushes only intermittently. If he had a new and particularly well-crafted brush, he would rinse it out with turpentine, sometimes shaking the excess turpentine onto the floor of the basement. Then he would knead the bristles of the brush in his hand to be sure that they were still supple, and put the brush away with the bristles upward, so as not to lose their shape. His old brushes did not find their way out of the coffee can filled with turpentine or paint thinner. They sat in there for months at a time, until a new job presented itself. The can usually had as many brushes stuck into it as it could hold and looked exactly like Jasper John’s “Painted Bronze”, a bronze sculpture of the same subject.
As he searched through the can for one that could do the job, he pulled out a brush, wiped it with a rag, bending it as he did so, to see if there was still any life in the brush. The thin brushes sloped in the bottom of the can and could not be coaxed into straightening out again. Others remained straight, but each bristle was splayed. Most of my father’s brushes were made from natural bristles, but in the 1960s synthetic brushes were introduced. They looked good on the display at the hardware store, but even I could see the advantage of the old worn-in bristle brushes that responded to your touch.
Long before I knew who Ken Noland or Barnett Newman were, my father taped the length of the boat to create the waterline. The age of the tape, climate of the room and pressure used to adhere the tape, all influenced the quality of the edge. The one thing you wanted to avoid was an edge that bled. That took hours to retouch and never looked as good as a stripe made in one stroke.
No Land, Photograph by Leslie Parke
This early introduction to materials, tools, and the freedom to create despite the call of convention, allowed me to feel, at an early age, that anything was possible. And my mother, always chose experience over convention. She was not remotely alarmed, for example, when I took a suitcase full of Fuller Brush-man samples and poured all the cologne and powder into the non-draining sink of my Suzy Homemaker Kitchenette.
Our home was not particularly artistic, either. We had two Currier and Ives prints that made me wonder if one day we would be donning red riding gear and heading to the woods to hunt. And here and there we had prints of Clipper ships or the America Cup Racing boats. But there was no real art in our house, not even reproductions of art. We did have two art books — Fifty Centuries of Art from the Metropolitan Museum, and another one that was a survey of American art. While the rest of the house slept, I would sneak downstairs and pull these books from the shelf and place them in the middle of a square of streaming sunlight on the floor. There I sat with my legs akimbo and imagined myself entering the tiny landscapes in the background of a Hans Memling painting, or the vast interior of a Pieter Janszoon Saenredam church.
My first encounter with real art came when I visited our neighbor’s house, the Zerns. Ed Zern wrote “Exit Laughing” a column for Field and Stream. My sister was friends with their daughter, Erica. Ed Zern looked like Ernest Hemingway. Everything in the Zern house had a design component. They didn’t let anything into the house if they didn’t like how it looked, felt or was used. This is not to say that they spent money on “designer goods”, far from it. The only design label in their house was their own. Usually, when I came to visit, I offered to water their plants, in order to, gain access to this magical world.
The living room had chairs by Eames and Le Corbusier. There were African sculptures on the mantel piece and masks on the walls. There was a zebra rug on the floor, one that Ed had killed himself in Africa. Standing in the corner was what I thought was a modern sculpture, it had all the lines of a Brancusi, but I come to find out that it was a piece of wood that held a gondolier’s oar, and as it is worked overtime had taken on this shape, that they rightly recognized as a wonderful piece of sculpture. They had a painting in the stairwell by Jimmy Ernst, son of Max, and a Ben Shahn in the bedroom, both of whom they knew. They had a gouache by Calder into which their daughter had surreptitiously slipped a one-inch paper dot painted yellow. She felt that there was something wrong with the composition that this dot would solve. Years later she told her father, who had not noticed the change. He didn’t believe her; the painting was perfect as it was. She made him open the frame and out dropped the dot.
Erica, who was at least nine years older than me, liked to test me. She made me tell her which were the best pieces of art in the house and why. This was not a matter of opinion; she knew which were the best pieces. You had to look and look and then you would just know.
By the time I entered my first art museum in New York, this approach to art was already well ingrained. Unlike most children, whose introduction to art comes through making it, mine came first through looking at it.