Catalogue: Drawing on the World

Drawing on the World

John Parman photo-collages / Vivienne Flesher watercolors Opening 11 June 2022, 1111 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco

Catalogue | Drawing on the World

Vivienne Flesher & John J. Parman | The Pallas Gallery | June 2022

Vivienne Flesher

Vivienne flesher & Leanne Shapton: A Conversation

When the NewYorkReviewofBookseditors decided to illustrate its symposium about the new threat to abortion access posed by Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbsv. JacksonWomen’sHealthOrganization , Leanne Shapton’s first thought was Vivienne Flesher. Her lines are lithe but there is a jagged, dark smudginess to them that undercuts what might otherwise be mistaken for a gentle femininity. Her drawings seduce even when depicting the violence of domesticity and the law. Her babies can be cute while grimacing; her naked women communicate their power. In addition to drawing 14 illustrations for the series of essays about the end of Roe , Flesher contributed a painting that served as the cover for NYRB’s June 9 issue.

Leanne Shapton: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what got you painting and drawing in the first place?

Vivienne Flesher: When I was growing up, in the suburbs of Long Island, I had a terrible time in school, trouble with math and spelling, but I could draw, and I could ride horses. So, my options seemed really clear to me: be an artist or join the circus. I ended up studying at Parsons and remained in New York City for many years before somehow ending up in San Francisco. I am still a New Yorker in my heart.

LS: I wanted to work with you on this series not only because I thought abortion might be an issue you care about but because we needed so many images so quickly, and I know how fast you can think and draw. Where were you when I asked if you might be available? And had you heard about the draft opinion at that point?

VF: I knew this was coming, I think all of us have known since Trump and Mitch McConnell cheated to put antiabortion judges on the Supreme Court. I was away from my studio when I saw your e-mail on my phone. I couldn’t read it well because of the sun and I didn’t have my glasses. I immediately said yes to your project anything to fight for abortion rights but I had no idea you wanted so many drawings in such a short period of time until I returned to my studio, and glasses, and could properly read your message. I have been mostly painting during the Covid years and wasn’t certain I still had what it takes to work like a full-time illustrator.

LS: Did any of the 14 essays strike a chord with you?

VF: Many of them moved me. I thought I knew this material; I feel passionate about it. But I learned so much that I

hadn’t known before. Each writer conveyed something I hadn’t known or felt before. Christine Henneberg was powerful and moving. I’m older than you are, and I was personally struck by Liza Batkin’s piece. In my youth, men often behaved as though their word was sacrosanct. The dishonesty and smarminess of Justice Alito’s reasoning is elucidated in Batkin’s essay.

LS: The previous two illustrations you did for us were portraits of Patricia Highsmith and Hannah Arendt. You drew both of them smoking cigarettes. These days, very few writers are photographed smoking I suppose I want to ask where your visual dark streak comes from. I particularly like how you portray women because of that streak.

VF: I am pleased you enjoy my dark side. I suppose we all have that lurking around inside of us. As an illustrator most of my clients haven’t wanted to see it. But my work for you and my own painting are where I can let it come out. While smoking is a vile and dangerous habit, it’s a gorgeous prop just look at classic black-and-white movies or photography from the early twentieth century.

LS: Did you deliberately scale back on full-time illustration work in order to paint?

VF: I was bored with illustration, and when Covid hit I thought, “Why I am still doing this, if it’s not making me grow or isn’t interesting to me any longer?” When I was just starting out as an illustrator, the art and editorial departments were equal but separate entities. Over time editorial and marketing gained all the power. Ads, book jackets, even most publications are no longer as exciting visually. I, like so many, searched for something to get me through the Covid years. My love of solitude and my art sustained me more than that, they brought me joy. Right now, I am obsessed with creating digital art from drawings, paintings, photographs. I love what Photoshop brings to the process. These files can be reproduced at any scale.

LS: Are you reading more nonfiction or fiction lately? And does your reading inform your personal paintings?

VF: I recently finished TheFamishedRoad , by Ben Okri, and used fragments of his sentences as titles for a show of paintings. His writing is like being lost in a dream. Mostly I have been watching movies. I will photograph moments of films and incorporate them in my new work on the computer. As you know, when you’re an artist, there are times when everything becomes your art and it’s exciting to follow that.

LS: I’m curious about the cover image. What is the story behind it? I really like the crossed arms of the figure. That gesture makes me think of something in the balance, a pause or a defense.

VF: When I have had the time, I have been doing small paintings for myself. Sometimes these paintings were of the people I met on my travels; I did a series of the wonderful people I met in Papua New Guinea when I spent a month there years ago. Sometimes these small paintings are of friends or objects in my life. I can’t recall precisely but I think the one on your cover is from a book I was looking at during the pandemic. I love what you are seeing in her posture and believe art is about what the viewer sees in a painting. For me, the less revealed the better, unless I am needing to create an illustration; then my work needs to convey something quick and tangible. I much prefer mystery.

LS: Your paintings, at least many of the ones we considered for the cover, made us think of Rodin, his Cambodian dancers and erotic studies. Are you a fan of his? What figurative work do you like or are you looking at?

VF: I love Rodin’s watercolors. They are so elegant. Recently I discovered Asafo flags. I’m not sure that they are finding their way into my work, but I love looking at them. My husband, Ward Schumaker, is also an artist, and we are constantly inspiring each other. Which is a good thing, since we have been locked down together during this weird time.

Vivienne Flesher: Watercolors

Vivienne Flesher

John J. Parman

Artist's statement

In 2013, I started making collages using a program called Procreate on my iPad or iPhone. My process reflects two visits I made to an exhibition of the collages of Kurt Schwitters at the old BAMPFA building on the uppermost tier, if memory serves. Later, I read that Schwitters collected discarded things for raw material. Like him, I look for things that catch my eye.

The painter Henrik Drescher told me that he’d miss the hands-on aspect, working digitally. I wove for four years, also starting around 2013, and its tactility was a source of pleasure. My collages have their own rhythm and variation. They reflect accidents as much as intentions.

Poetry is one form my writing takes. I haven't tried to riff on a poem in a collage or vice versa, yet both reflect the zeitgeist of their making. A friend who read a selection of poems I wrote in 2021 noted how themes run through them. This is also true of the collages.

Weaving drew on my education as a designer improvising on the pattern and introducing color and texture. My teacher was in the Japanese Saori lineage, which sees creativity in the Zen manner as "one continuous mistake,” to quote Gail Sher on writing.

I still have my loom, but I only like to weave with others. The studio closed and I stopped. If another opens at some point, or if I can find other weavers, I may start again. My oldest son's ridge house has a studio space, which would be ideal for weaving. The poems and collages are two solitary practices, but they draw on a world of talk, writing, and imagery. I listen and I see.

Berkeley, 24 May 2022

Artist's restatement

Poem 25 in Pamphlet2021 , a selection of poems I wrote last year, exemplifies the way I work. The poem begins by glossing two book reviews I read, close together of a writer and an artist. I put them together, but the focus of the first stanza is on the artist. It ends by asking “What then is the key to immortality?” The question’s implied: the reviews cast these men as also-rans. The second stanza places me in relation to the artist. The question is repeated. The third stanza quotes one review’s critique of him, then returns to the issue of sexual identity raised in the first. The question recurs as a hinge between these thoughts. The fourth stanza takes up the question, concluding that most immortality is transient or arbitrary. Only beauty endures. The fifth and last stanza hands this to women, remembering a frieze remnant and a sarcophagus seen at the Met. In Pamphlet21 , the poem is bracketed by a photo-collage in which a Pallas post of the young Robert Rauschenberg, painting, figures, and a frieze remnant, photographed at the Met, that captures a woman’s classically fecund beauty.

This is the affinity between my photo-collages and my poems, which arise from “something seen or read” that sets thoughts in motion or contains their seeds. A woman who read Pamphlet21told me that she saw themes or strands running through the poems. When I look at my photo-collages chronologically, using Tumblr’s archive feature, I see that a particular image may make several appearances, as if I’m trying to draw out what it suggested when I came across it.

Poetic forms like rhyming sonnets or villanelles are closer to patterned weaving, in which the improvisation plays off what the initial structure imposes. As Frederick Seidel said, “You start off with grey eyes and the sonnet may not want grey and it may not want eyes, either.” I sometimes write such poems because they have their pleasures, as weaving does, but most of my poems, like most of my photo-collages, unfold from a source that I elaborate more or less discursively. They share a desire to know more about that source how its story and mine relate or interact.

Berkeley, 31 May 2022

Vapid novels of bourgeois life. A man happy in the present, unambitious, dressed demurely in his plaid skirt playing a script girl's appointed part. Back street in Crete, a house he set out to three patronesses, half a stake each so oversold and yet so charming they forgave, and slept with women as an extension of friendship though preferring sailors. Prisoners are best, being hungry, but that was the other. What then is the key to immortality?

Bourgeois life is like a garden gate one slips into when life is pressing, when someone wants you in theirs. I sleep alone. I dress in work shirts and eschew those striped city ones I wore for years. I walk. I could be demure, a script girl of a sort, trade among those potentates demanding a kind of sexless deference. Demure and self-effacing, but I gave it away. What then is the key to immortality?

Too much sun is bad for painting. Too much personality's character's destruction, it is said, it is said, but what then is the key to immortality? I miss the heat, the way the sun set across the north end, the bay's slot and the island old prison like a ship. I never went for boys, but the girls are unreliable as lovers, only friends.

Immortality is so many dice games with the afterlife, oh so many names worn away with time or never cast or carved in the first place. Beauty only, its form and features, endures.

A mother is laid to rest and her man remembers her tenderness, wrapped between her legs and thighs, sighs becoming children in time, babes and then men women following her casket, the garlands of flowers still there in the stonework, a head in profile, her torso with her breasts and flanks. This is her monument, this resting place, very like a bath.

John J. Parman: Photo-collages

© 2022 John J. Parman