Private Art

An audience of One

Last year was one of the hardest years of my life. I spent the first six weeks of 2023 sick as a dog with RSV, and then things just went south from there. I didn’t have the bandwidth to put much out in the world over the course of that year, as I was much more focused on taking care of my family.

During that time, I realized that my art practice was lacking something, and that something was a personal private art-doing. I realized I was needing a sketchbook practice where I could play, experiment, and fail as an end in itself. Something beyond my casual drawings of my cat. Something to feed my soul that had nothing to do with making finished-work-hanging-on-a-wall-for-sale.

And yes, making work that hangs-on-a-wall-for-sale feeds my soul too, but the public nature, the outwardness of making work for sale—work that I experience as my conversation with the world—is inherently different from a private art practice—which is work that I perceive as a conversation with myself. Something that had slowly disappeared from my practice without my noticing.

So that’s what I did—and am doing. It’s great to play with materials and tools I don’t normally use, to expand my visual vocabulary with those materials, and to pay attention to process without connecting it to a larger project I want to accomplish.

It’s also very slow. Which has shown me how much I need to stop trying to achieve for a hot freaking second—even in my sketchbook. And to truly learn to be okay with working small, surrounded by explorations rather than finished work. To let myself make bad awkward experiments that I sometimes find hard to look at. To let myself obsess over formal exercises with no particular long term goal.

And most importantly, to figure out how to be more uncensored.

Because allowing myself to truly be uncensored in my art process has been a conscious endeavor my entire adult life. I’ve learned that it’s actually less like jumping off a cliff and more like peeling an onion—slowly removing one impossibly thin, translucent layer after another. Digging into this personal practice is another layer of that onion.

Working this way has also shown me that I don’t know what a full-on private or personal art practice really looks like for me yet. Or perhaps more accurately, it’s that I realize, even a year in, that I’m still at the beginning.

And that’s kind of exciting.

Mesmerizing Honesty

Immersed in developing a new private art practice, I have become extremely interested in looking at the sketchbooks of other artists.

I’ve been obsessed with Frida Kahlo’s sketchbook from the last ten years of her life which is a combination of diary entries and sketchbook drawings. I’m extremely inspired by her uncensored, heart-felt approach to expressing her inner world.

You can buy it on Bookshop or Amazon. (These are my affiliate links.)

Of course, she was so uncensored because that’s how she was, but also because she didn’t think anyone would see it. In fact, some of it is so raw, that I often feel like a voyeur looking at it—like I’m breaching her privacy.

“This feels wrong,” I’d say to myself as I continued to turn the pages.

But you know, her almost teenage obsession with Diego Rivera, her anguished drawings of her relentless physical pain and losses, and even her full-throated expressions of support for people like Stalin and Mao have a poignancy that really touches me—there’s such a dignity in her honesty that I really admire. I ask myself if I could ever be that honest on the page. I find it mesmerizing.

But also, over the course of her life she had twenty-two surgeries, including the amputation of her left leg below the knee. She lived at the edge of extreme chronic physical pain, so her day to day existence was a constant state of heightened vulnerability and fatigue. There was probably no other way her sketchbook-diary could be except raw, honest and uncensored.

Her sketchbook seemed like a lifeline, a way of asserting her continued existence when perhaps she couldn’t leave her bed or sit upright to paint. I certainly can’t envy the situation that begat that kind of honesty. Instead I simply salute it.

Here’s a short video perusal of the book to give you an idea:

I love that her private art-making offered her an expressive outlet that has a real power to this day. And as a result, after her death, people like me get to pour over this collection of raw expressions and learn from it—learn from the honesty within the drawings themselves.

Animated Inspiration

If you’re a Frida freak like me, there’s a new Frida Kahlo documentary streaming on Amazon Prime from director Carla Gutierrez that you might want to check out. I watched it twice already. They animate her diary images and weave them throughout the storyline. I was holding my copy of the book in my hands and flipping through it as I watched.

Beforehand, I thought I’d hate they way they’d capitalize on her images by animating them, but it added a kind of magical dimension that I really liked.

Plus, I’m a sucker for old photos and film footage—you can see images of Mexico City in the twenties and thirties, some dreamy old images of Lake Xochimilco as well as some clips of the Mexican revolution.

PBS also had a good three part series on her life that I recommend. There’s overlap between the two but I really appreciated watching both and seeing the differences. The Gutierrez film has more magic in it.

If you make art, do you have a sketchbook practice that serves you well? Do you think it matters to have a private art practice?

If you don’t make art, do you keep a private journal? Do you give yourself a private expressive outlet? An altar maybe? Something else?

Or maybe you’re a Frida Kahlo fan…or not?

Leave a comment, I’d love to hear.

Recommendations This Week

In the comments section on last week’s post, Yes and No, several readers offered fun information and artistic inspiration that I thought you might also enjoy.

• Eliza Factor from the wonderful Wayward Utopias suggested a wonderful public artist with a huge “Yes, And” approach to her work.

  Her name is Toshiko MacAdam and she crochets huge playground environments by hand.
  Here’s one example of her work:

• Kathy Hopewell from the substack Fur Cup imagines stories about individual surrealist artworks—I loved this one she wrote about a Meret Oppenheim painting: Stone Woman.

• Eliza Anderson from the substack Two Houses had just written about how her mom, a visual artist in NYC back in the day, wrote a proposal offering to ‘fix’ Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc during the all the controversy. I find that hilarious and, as Eliza says, audacious.

Thank you, as always, for reading all the way to the end—it genuinely means the world to me. If you know anyone else you think might like this newsletter, I’d love it if you’d pass it along to them.