Artist Statement

Lisa Marie Brodsky Jari Chevalier Cleave Artist’s Statement What is this pain in my chest? I was forty-six years old when I began to make the collage art you It clings to my see here. Earlier in my life, I had trained in the literary arts at Columbia breast—left one, dead one. University and at City College of New York, where I studied with my long- term mentor in poetry, William Matthews. But he suddenly died when he I am a half of something. was 55, in 1997, just when my poems were starting to get published. And, The other—leftover on some by the early 2000s, to my own grief and dismay, my work as a literary artist sterile table, beside had lapsed into dormancy. some discarded gloves. When I am not creatively active I feel oppressed and confined. So this was a trying time for me, one in which I felt a strong need to create but The heat has turned off. was not drawn to writing. I had a little 2 x 2 x 2 inch covered box of fine One nipple I have, as cold Japanese papers that I’d picked up at a tag sale years back—and I got the as a Christmas cranberry. urge to make something with them. I was living in Boston at the time and, while I was constructing the very first collage inlay, it was good medicine. Listen: I used to dream in wholes— I felt myself coming back to life. great circular suns Over the months ahead, without any formal training in drawing, breathing with open mouths. composition, color theory, perspective, or the like, I collected a treasure Wide cat yawns. horde of fine art papers and international currency, and bought a used set Now all things of ten flat file drawers to organize the papers according to color families. I took classes in both Italian-style and Japanese (Suminagashi) paper are split right down marbling, which involves painting on the surface tension of water, also known as aqueous surface design. The aqueous painting is captured by the middle. slowly and carefully laying a piece of art paper down on the floating paint, Half this, half that, lifting it off, and letting it dry. In Italian-style marbling, which most of us and in my dreams, look: have seen in the inside covers of old books, oil-based inks are used and you have one arm the colors are often combed into uniform, traditional patterns. Japanese reaching out to me. Suminagashi marbling employs a similar process using water-based inks. You can also paint an abstract work of art using the same aqueous painting process—and I had a wild time in these classes, making a slew of original aqueous-design papers to use in new collage inlays. The inlay process involves sketching out the rudimentary architecture of the piece, with the largest shapes penciled directly onto the canvas or other substrate. I then use tracing paper to create each piece that’s to be cut and then inlaid with archival glue. I can see through the tracing paper 92 / ARTFUL DODGE Graphica / ARTFUL DODGE / 93 to the underlying paper and thereby choose exactly where to make the predetermined?” cuts. If I cut out a piece of paper and for some reason don’t like the way it “Get It” is another collage employing international currency, inlaid with looks on the collage, I will either recut the piece from a different paper or a marbled paper I made in a class. This small (6 in. x 8 in.) work depicts a modify the first piece to make it work. The final work of art thus involves hand grabbing at a geometrically structured “fabric” of world currency, countless decisions regarding form, pattern, and color as I build to a unified including circles of metallic paper in silver, gold, and copper. But the hand’s whole constructed of many highly disparate parts. grasping action reveals an underlying amorphous and borderless organic I’m fascinated with the understanding that many different patterns and realm, as if the fabric has been a façade—a complex but orderly Potemkin forms share the same space. For example, I’m looking at the floor of my village obscuring something more challenging, provocative, and real. room. The irregular patterns of the wood grain keep being interrupted I deliberately repurpose many other materials besides currency. For by the orderly pattern of the cut boards, which is again interrupted by a example, in “Man’s Search for Meaning” I cut out the central portion of rug here, a mat there, another rug, or the legs and footprints of furniture. a print of Louis-Frédéric Schützenberger’s 1887 etching “Ulysses Defying If we looked with a microscope at any one spot there would be yet other the Cyclops” (found at a tag sale), made an “x-acto cut” of an x-ray film patterns (and, possibly, even creatures! dust mites, etc.), and then with an of the outlines of a hand (that a radiology student gave me), and then electron microscope, still more; each and all perceived through the meeting inlaid these with a piece of paper featuring the colors of water and stone. I of mind and matter. The same goes for anywhere you look, a table top, the purposely damaged this water-stone paper with a mix of water and glue to surface of your skin, the landscape. I see the world this way. fix a water-bleed quality into it. Then, once the piece was dry, I added three I also try to portray this kind of awareness in my art, to signal to polished stones to the collage’s surface, as though these very stones, which viewers a sensitivity to multidimensional awareness that links inner space look wet and gleaming via the polishing tumbler, landed in this work with exterior space, a holistic view of bio-psycho-social unity, of science of art all the way from the distant past of the Western psyche. Homer’s and intuition, a vast, connected, multivalent, dynamic, and intelligent verse epic expressed through Schützenberger’s fine etching, embedded universe. in my contemporary collage art, now in conversation with your own Cutting and inlaying pieces of international paper currency has, in some contemplation. collages, helped in this portrayal. Such currencies will eventually become Despite all the examples of intentionality I could provide about my obsolete, and soon may hold greater value and significance as bits and art, at times I have been shocked in the midst of creating something or pieces of art such as mine. Currency is an endlessly fascinating material— when a work reaches completion. I literally gasped when I made the with its intricate, official patterns of extremely fine dots and lines, its words man kneeling on rusted metal to commit hara kiri, with a globe for a and numbers, its security features and potent symbols, including faces of head and another globe in his about-to-be-eviscerated belly (“Survival historic significance. It is also an extremely durable paper. And double- of the Materialists”). And I literally broke down and cried upon finishing sided. I like that the back side of any piece of currency, once glued down, is “American Legacy,” a collage (not included here) depicting a mushroom still there—and we have a record of what’s on it, though it’s hidden against cloud framed in a simulated traditional Japanese scroll painting, with the the canvas. spirits of domination and submission at its center. We did that to Japan, I In the work “Genetic,” the chromosome forms and DNA—represented thought, a culture I’ve loved since, as a young child, I entered the Japanese by strings of double helixes—are literally made of money. Thus, for me, aesthetic through my parents’ picture books showing extraordinary details the very material I used to create “Genetic” starts to pose questions: “How of Japanese architecture set in exquisite Japanese gardens. deep does our attraction to money go?” “Is the enterprise of science woven In my work overall, I hope you perceive this abiding Eastern sensibility through and through with money?” “Have we inherited a value system and spirituality, which began in early childhood. My parents were interested from our progenitors that we pass on to our heirs?” “Is anything about in the spiritual teachings of J. Krishnamurti, a 20th century Indian-born central banking and the culture of money biologically encoded?” and “To philosopher who called for deep inquiry into (and consistent observation what degree are our thought forms about value and worth genetically of) one’s own mind and of all phenomena. He was also an influential social 94 / ARTFUL DODGE / Graphica Graphica / ARTFUL DODGE / 95 critic who urged people, as did The Buddha, to be a light unto themselves, to question social conditioning, and to dedicate themselves to evaluating reality through personal discovery and a rich inner life. He said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” His teachings appealed to the natural artist and rebel in me. They affirmed my innate proclivities and challenged me to penetrate my own conditioning, to reach inward for a more nourishing way of life and assessment of truth. In 1988, I also began to practice meditation in the Thai Forest Tradition. In addition to a daily practice, I have sat many months in silent, monastic retreats. And as I work on art, I find myself in a similar state of mind that is highly meditative, not thinking, just doing.

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