In my installation 95 Chimes, I used wind chimes in different sizes and made from many different materials (including shells and bamboo) to relate string theory to music and to the origin of matter. Nature, like great art, does not explain itself, but its greatest power is the experience of sometimes unpredictable effects, and perhaps this is what Cage was getting at. Once at a meeting of dedicated musicians, my father walked up to Cage and asked him, “What does your music mean?” and Cage replied, “Does it have to mean anything?” I have been thinking of his comment ever since, and how in addition to chance events, the ethereal and the ordinary not only intermingle in art but in life. (My father had six degrees in music my mother, a master’s in education as a family, we always had lively and wide-ranging discussions.) Through my father I met John Cage, who was a collaborator with Henry Cowell, a musician known to crawl inside pianos to pluck at their strings. My parents, older brother, and I would sit in the audience and later deconstruct each piece played and compare them to similar movements in the arts and politics.
When I was a child growing up in the New York suburbs, I thought trekking into Manhattan to hear music by my father and his colleagues, performed by New York Philharmonic musicians or talented students, was the coolest thing imaginable. That was 1995, and it’s still my favorite way of working.ĭebra Swack, still from 95 Chimes, presented at the Staller Center for the Arts, 2016, in Stony Brook, NY This was another “Aha!” moment because it brought together the figure and how personal it is in combination with abstraction. One day I was doing a large abstract painting and small figures appeared that started to tell a story. That was another “Aha!” moment.īut as much as I enjoyed working abstractly, I also loved painting the figure and creating narratives. It was so exciting not to know what each was going to look like and it was all intuitive and free-associative. A year later I took some six-by-eight index cards and started making marks all over them and pulling out shapes that resonated with me and white-outing others. The association of painting and smoking was huge, so I stayed out of my studio for nine months and had no idea what would happen when I returned. I was a heavy smoker back then and knew how hard it was going to be to quit. It was very satisfying to have my work so connected to my feelings but after eleven years they stopped nurturing me and I knew it was time to give them up. The symbols were placed in rooms where the dramas would unfold. That started an eleven-year journey in which my work was like a visual diary of my day-to-day encounters. Then I went on to make symbols for everyone else in my life, including my mother. I drew shape after shape until I said “Aha!” This is it.
I was very tough on the outside and wanted more of my vulnerability to show, so I started creating symbols-one was an abstracted heart because that’s what I wanted to expose. It was the beginning of finding a new vocabulary.
#AHA MOMENT IMAGES HOW TO#
She died the following year and I did a series of works, about my frustration about not knowing how to paint about this great loss. My mother was diagnosed with lung cancer in that same year. In 1971, about six years after finishing art school (in Detroit) I felt like I wanted my work to be more personal. I am 73 and have been painting for 50 years and there has been more than one “Aha” moment. Brenda Goodman, Self-Portrait I, oil on canvas, 60 by 50 inches
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