Women Born In The 1960s

"Ever since we were at Yale together, John Currin has said he admires my ability to believe. I remember once in a critique of my work, my teacher William Bailey was furious that it didn’t have enough “fiction building.” He quoted Magritte: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Lisa!” I said, “But I want the paintings to be real!” To which he snapped, “Well, that’s not a good goal.” John was at that critique, and he jumped in, saying: “I actually think it’s amazing she thinks they’re real!”"

"It was a very important argument for me, because I understood that there is an orthodox way of looking at things: “This is a representation. This is not a pipe, it’s a painting. It’s not real,” which feels pretty obvious and rather dull at this point. There was this other possibility that seemed juicier and more fucked up and hopeful. And I did have to come to a synthetic approach to making, but once I could do that, I could also believe in painting again, and make it real again. I’ve taken it to that next step, and my gamble is to succeed or fail at that."

"Misogyny. There is no exact parallel to the story. I didn’t read a great writer like Babel who contextualized it for me. What I learned from Guston is that if you point the finger at yourself first, then you are freer. Misogyny is so rampant, extreme and insidious that it doesn’t get called out nearly enough. A lot of men, including gay men, are misogynists, and a lot of women are too. I’ve experienced it personally from so many, and I can therefore assume that because I live in this society I must have absorbed it too, so if I want to talk about misogyny I have to first acknowledge the aspects of it I’ve absorbed. I’m not the kind of person or artist, nor do I admire the kind of person or artist, who proselytizes, pontificates or points outward at others. I admire Guston and Diane Arbus and Fassbinder because they show a myriad of internal conflicts. That’s what art is—a struggle filtered through the self. That is how it becomes generous."

"I love Solzhenitsyn’s writing for his insights into morality and humanity, and today I came across a quote from The Gulag Archipelago: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” I love that idea. If you think of yourself as “good,” you should think about how easily you could be evil under different circumstances. It’s important to embrace the range and try to comprehend it. Philip Guston said something similar when he talked about imagining himself like Isaac Babel, who wrote about riding around with the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet War, witnessing rape, pillage and killing. Guston was able to envision himself not only through the lens of the Italian painters he adored, but through the hooded figures of Ku Klux Klan. He recognized that the enemy lies within."

"There are great Caravaggios in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome—the Saint Matthew cycle. The first painting, on the left of the small chapel, is The Calling of Saint Matthew. Jesus points at Matthew, who sits across from him with his head down. Matthew is the only one who isn’t looking at Jesus. On the opposite wall, on the right side of the chapel, hangs the third painting that shows the end of the narrative, Matthew’s martyrdom: Matthew lies on the ground and some guy with a sword is standing over him, just about to murder him. Imagine how you’d feel in that moment! I stared at the painting for so long, fascinated by how everyone is freaking out except for Matthew, who is reaching up. What is he looking at? It’s an angel leaning over a cloud and extending a palm, as if holding a stick to a drowning man. You realize that Matthew is a man who lived and died with belief in eternal salvation, which is why he’s being murdered—he’s dying for his beliefs. It’s interesting that Caravaggio depicts him seeing his salvation. Everyone else sees horror and chaos, but Matthew sees an angel extending a palm. In this painting you witness him becoming something."

"Cool kids always think their shit doesn’t stink, but Fassbinder reminds us that our shit does stink, and on top of that it’s rotten, and it’s OK to admit that. We’re all human. I’m interested in formal language and emotional content—formalism and feelings have a perfect marriage, if you can handle it. Looking back, I realize how much of the work was led by a rather dry and clear process and yet the results are anything but dry. I set a path and let the weirdness and eccentric stuff come up on its own; all that content just found a place out of the orderly way I had set up the process."

"So much of my work is about doing the very obvious. Making art is like finding your Excalibur, the sword in the stone. It’s right there and others can tug and tug, but you have to be Arthur to pull it out. Anyone can decide, intellectually, to make paintings where “colors come alive as characters”—but try to do it! Few people can pull it off. You have to have lived your life in a certain way, and have believed all along that that is possible, in order to make it work."

"That was partly why I made the “Bad Habits” sculptures in 1995. In going from painting to painting I was “recasting” my characters every time. I had to get to know them one by one and understand what they mean. I realized through Fassbinder that it would be interesting to have your blonde—your Hanna Schygulla—as one person in an ensemble of actors who each play a range of characters. The range should be small—you can’t make people be something they’re not. Fassbinder was aware of how to use everyone’s qualities. Their fading looks, like Fassbinder’s own physical deterioration, became his material. They all had to be very smart and not vain to allow this to happen. Fassbinder’s actors came from the theater and theater is close to sculpture, so perhaps they had an awareness of the sculptural properties of their bodies."

"I arranged the “Bad Habits” figurines into groups, which I studied to make the paintings. I was thinking about how Tintoretto made wax figures to illuminate scenes and understand complicated lighting. “Bad Habits” is about light. To keep my focus on that aspect of the work, I didn’t want to have to keep reinventing characters. I could have kept working on that series forever but I made myself stop. I realized that as an artist I was about more than that, so I forced myself to move on."

"One of the ideas about art that was gaining momentum when I was student, which I heard but didn’t take seriously, was that psychology has no place in painting. And so, as a 19-year-old, I responded by putting it back there, boldly and for no good fucking reason."

"So, to answer your question, when I think of being an artist, I think of the central painting, between those two, showing Saint Matthew as an old man taking dictation from an angel, doing divine work on earth. The man depicted in the painting is a nincompoop and the angel is impatiently counting on his fingers, as if Matthew isn’t keeping up. It’s so funny: that’s Caravaggio’s wit. The Passion of Saint Matthew is one of the most beautiful testaments we have, but here he is shown as a very ordinary man. I believe Caravaggio related to Matthew because of how beautifully this story is depicted, with so much feeling and sensitivity. The three paintings show the utter transformation of a man over time."

"The interesting thing about Hippies is how those male figures jump out from behind the central woman, and the painting did that to me—in the process of making it, the men said, “Ta-da!” They came out of the work. And I had to ask myself where to take it next. I think that Hippies should have come after the portraits it was shown with at David Zwirner this spring, but it didn’t, it came first. I decided to make six to eight portraits of incubi and succubae using the structural idea of a grisaille painting with a flourish of what is called cangiantismo, a sort of spectral color-wheel effect that contrasts the grays. In the 16th century the Italian viewer understood it as a signal that the supernatural had arrived."

"The best paintings of depositions, crucifixions and entombments are images that are familiar if you’ve ever buried someone you love. Just today, I saw an image in the New York Daily News of the brother of Moises Locón Yac, who was killed in the explosion on Second Avenue on March 26, collapsing in the arms of a Red Cross worker. You see the same configuration in paintings of Mary Magdalene mourning Christ. I remember things through great pictures. When I look at Renaissance masterpieces I recall scenes like the one on Second Avenue—the profound grief of families realizing that their loved ones have been killed."

"I’ve come to experience art like a séance. Over time you can meld minds with artists: you laugh and feel their humor, or you are shocked by their sadness and grief. The main thing that comes across in Bellini’s paintings is the awesome potency and profound depth of feeling that made them. I’ve spent a good deal of my life looking at paintings, and what stands out to me is that, no matter when the painters lived, there are a lot of similarities among them. The work carries markers of the artist’s inner life—be it Carroll Dunham’s or Giovanni Bellini’s—for us to connect to. I find that humanity in art very appealing because it just cuts away all the layers of academia. Scholarship can buoy understanding in some ways but after a point can also drag you down, away from the art. Since contemporary artists are not hired by, say, the Vatican, we have the freedom to ask ourselves what we believe in and then to assert that belief. It’s actually a powerful liberty to own, and especially nice in our time when there are so many women’s voices in the mix."

"I’ve done grisaille paintings with flashes of intense color over the years. One painting like that would surface as an isolated element in a body of work every now and then. When Hippies appeared I wanted to see what would happen if I just stayed with it and didn’t let up. I really didn’t know where I was going, but at some point the art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné came to my studio and said it reminded him of the “Bad Babies” series [1991-92]. Both groups of paintings personify color. I remember looking at my palette table and telling Christian, “I just want to make this come alive.” It’s such a stupid idea, and yet I think that is what I did. I just had to keep believing in it. When things went wrong, when they veered off course, I would tell myself to just trust the process."

"Painters have always had to believe in formal language. It just didn’t used to be called into question as much as it is now. It is a belief that pictures can be formally coded and tell a story, and that viewers will understand that code even if they are not painters themselves. In contemporary art the language of painting is like a dialect of ancient Greek—most people just don’t understand it. Furthermore I don’t know how many people are willing to relax and let the meaning of the painting unfold, but I like to think they will feel the power of the form, almost unconsciously, whether they want to or not."

"Tasteless remarks and inappropriate advances against women should have no place in our society. We should expect that most of all from our leaders."

"This is our vision: Women rising together, pulling together up, chipping away at barriers together, changing conversations, sparking new fires of hope and courage and resolve within each other, and freeing each other in every aspect possible."

"You do not lose sight of what you believe in, you do lot lose sight of the goal. You drown out the voices, because there are bigger battles to fight."

"Ang mag pipigil nang sa korapsyon ay magsisimula sa pamahalaang tapat, bukas, at may itegridad"

"Tingin ko magiging unfair para sa city if gagamitin ko lang pagiging mayor bilang jumpoff point. Hindi ako magiging effective mayor kung ang iniisip ko lang ay yung 2028. (It would be unfair for Naga if I will use my position as jumpoff point in the 2028 elections. I will not be effective as Mayor if all I would think of is the next elections.)"

"How much of yourself are you willing to lose just to win?"

"When the path seems too difficult, remember that you were made for these times—to pave a new way forward for our nation, and for the rest of humanity."

"Don’t ask if it’s hard, ask if it is important … There are a lot of reasons to be frustrated but there is a bigger fight ahead. Drown out the noise and focus on what we need to do."

"In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love."

"It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us."

"Have you located your passion as if this was your last night on earth?"

"Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly. In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love.”"

"Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly"

"Now I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone.”"

"Loss is not felt in the absence of love"

"For loss is our common denominator. None of us will escape it. None of us will outrun death. What do we do in the space between that is our lives? What is the quality and richness of our lives? How do we move through struggle and let community hold us when we have been laid low? This"

"It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.”"

"I been in sorrow’s kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain’t got long to stay here."

"To live in memory and in dreams is a cruel comfort"

"“friendship in marriage is its own thing: friendship in a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a cappuccino every Sunday morning. Friendship in buying undershirts and underpants. Friendship in picking up a prescription or rescuing the towed car. Friendship in waiting for the phone call after the mammogram. Friendship in toast buttered just so. Friendship in shoveling the snow. I am the one you want to tell. You are the one I want to tell"

"In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms"

"They shared an unshakeable belief in beauty, in overflow, in everythingness, the bursting, indelible beauty in a world where there is so much suffering and wounding and pain"

"I am very passionate about theater and acting and never let my circumstances stand in my way of living my dream."

"Flowers live, they are perfect and they affect us; they are God’s glory, they make us know why we are alive and human, that we behold. They are beautiful, and then they die and rot and go back to the earth that gave birth to them."

"They put salt on the wound, and that made things worse. The way they have handled the whole situation, this is not what we expected as South Africans and people who have voted for this government to be in control"

"Death comes with a gift in the poem; our loved ones tell us here that what we see with our eyes is different from what we know: “The things/themselves.” “Oh, at last” is the moment of exaltation in the poem. Lamentation and exaltation are simultaneous here."

"Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss.”"

"My mother-in-law’s last night on earth, a fox crossed our path in Branford, Connecticut, as we left the hospice. We knew somehow that it was her, as I now know the ravenous hawk came to take Ficre. Do I believe that? Yes, I do. Poetic logic is my logic. I do not believe she was a fox. But I believe the fox was a harbinger. I believe that it was a strange enough occurrence that it should be heeded. Zememesh Berhe, the quick, red fox, soon passed from this life to the next"

"But I think fighting for your own fate is not the wrong thing to do. But fighting for something that was never meant to be yours, it's not worth it"

"The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.”"

"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand"

"Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave"

"“I wake up grateful, for life is a gift."

"You are never finished as an actor. The process of learning carries on. It never ends."