Old in Art School Quotes

“Before art school, I approached art as though it illustrated social relations and history, upholding or denouncing the political status quo. During my years in art school I increasingly concentrated on visual meaning, on how artwork looked—its composition, its color, its artist’s style, as separate from what it said about society. Critics call a preoccupation with appearance that ignores social meaning formalism, which carries a negative taint these days when formalism divorces art from the power relations surrounding its creation and circulation. Coming from the Left, I began as an anti-formalist. But as a maker of art, I moved toward formalism as I sought to discover processes of how art was made, a move prompted by the neglect of the formal qualities of the work of black artists, assumed to be important only according to the degree to which it critiqued American racism. Where Romare Bearden had figured in my mind as celebrating blackness and black Harlem, I now investigated how he made his work, step by step, how he decided what to depict and how to depict it. I was now seeing my father’s prized Sharecropper, by Elizabeth Catlett, which he bought from her in her studio in Mexico, less as a salute to black workers and more as a masterly lino print. From the opposite starting point, my relationship to Warhol encapsulated my trajectory.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

“I could not abandon the rest of me, even when the rest of me overwhelmed my art.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

“In my history books I have already had my say in clear language and discursive meaning about community. Now what history means to me in images is freedom from coherence, clarity, and collective representation. My images carry their own visual meaning, which may or may not explicate history usefully or unequivocally. For me now, image works as particularity, not as generalization. That is how art school changed my thinking about history and how visual art set me free.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

“described as indexical. What he meant was an image made by the physical being of the object, not a line drawing.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

“image works as particularity, not as generalization. That is how art school changed my thinking about history and how visual art set me free.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

“With a freedom unavailable to me as a historian, my imagination was feeding off history that I had written.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

“Lesson learned? Essential lesson learned! You can erase what you draw, even what you’ve spent a long time drawing and sweating over it. You can throw away what you paint and, as I learned to do later, cut it up and incorporate it into a new painting. A lesson to take straight to heart, and not only in art making.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

“It wasn’t always easy learning to be me . . . Being me, I guess, to be myself alone It was lonely, sometimes, sometimes it was blue”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over