Goldfish Grow to Their Corners

Geoff oggling Mimi's guest bedroom.

I recently visited the studios of two artists. Feisty, redheaded ladies with insatiable appetites for silliness and adventure and a lust for the brightest colors they can get their hands on. They are the kind of effortlessly generous women that can hardly find enough lucky targets to pour their affection onto. Both are figurative painters whose work walks right off the canvas and into the social sphere with life-sized portraits of friends and art scenes and the ways we gather. Sometimes their canvases even warp, grow a third dimension and morph into walls and installations. Neither artist finds reason to separate life from work so, as a friend of theirs, you’re never quite sure when you’re being framed.

Why bother to differentiate art vs a dinner party? (Painters from left: Mimi, Laini Nemett, Ellen Schneiderman, Geoffrey Miller)

They are also at opposite ends of their careers -- Laura looking up from her just-sprouted practice and Mimi looking down over her tall, lush one that bears strong, intricate branches and encases many concentric rings.

Mimi's.

Oh. And both Laura and Mimi have big live/work spaces (as pictured in all of these photos), which is the reason I thought to write about them together in the first place. Huge. The word “cavernous” comes to mind and can’t be shaken.

Mimi's studio space.

Mimi Gross spent a chunk of her twenties traveling around Italy in a horse-drawn carriage, supporting herself hand to mouth with puppet shows performed out of the back. She’s shot the shit with just about everyone you’ve read about in your 20^th century art textbook. Her stories of travel and art world exploits are endless and spellbinding. It’s hard to fathom all that she’s seen and shaped and loved and left behind.

Early portrait of Mimi.

The one piece Mimi did about her travels in Berlin. A light box diorama. Simple and a bit slapstick -- I was immediately brought back there and felt the weight of the city in the paper construction that must have weighed next to nothing.

She has lived and worked in this giant flat in Manhattan for (I believe) over 30 years. The walls are stacked salon style to high ceilings with bright, bold art that documents and fictionalizes so many pasts it’s dizying. And the other half of the space is all new work – her studio. I think what leaves me most in awe of Mimi, and it’s quite a list to top, is the freshness of her palette. Her studio is like an enormous, overgrown garden. The new work climbing up the walls, ceiling and floor, is obviously on some sort of super fertilizer.

The bedroom portion of Laura's room.

Laura Hudson, who graduated from MICA’s MFA program with me last May, is discovering and staking out for the first time the territory that will be hers to mine and build on. Like me, she has little more than instinct and the voices in her head (painting teachers, the elder art gods, buddies, favorite musicians, Tom Bombadil (that could just be me)) to guide her to strange new lands. At this point the path seems arbitrary and disjointed, but I have a feeling that when she looks back over her travels, the path will show itself to be patterned with purpose and direction. Laura is someone who is sensitive enough to feel the pull of her “true North” and bold enough to follow it blindly.

The studio part.

She chose to stay in Baltimore after she graduated in large part because of the space she lives in, one of the rooms in the H&H Building – a vital organ of Bmore’s grassroots art and music scene, housing 3 galleries and 2 music venues (the count changes weekly). The show that is up now at Gallery Four, Laura’s floor, “Cowboys and Engines” by Dustin Carlson, stakes out the vast, industrial space brilliantly. The director of the Baltimore Museum of Art told me that she thought it was one of the strongest shows she’s seen, anywhere, in years.

Laura's door opens onto this.

Laura has a solo show coming up at the Arlington Arts Center in Virginia in the fall and, to prep, they let her throw a sleepover party in the space. She filmed it and is plotting life-sized paintings of the revelers that she will hang for the opening as a similar crowd fills the room.

And then this.

And finally this.

Fight for Me

Perseus slaying the dragon and freeing the maiden by Edward Burne-Jones.

If you want to marry my daughter, you’re going to have to find the ring I’ve dropped into the middle of the Red Sea. If she is your heart’s desire, you will have to find the secret place where she goes to dance each night. You must beat her in a race, even though she plays dirty. You must eat 300 oxen -- skin, bones and all -- and then drink 100 casks of wine in one night. If you fail in this, I will cut off your head. But if you succeed, the kingdom and the most beautiful bride will be yours.

The Grimm brothers recorded more than a few of these deadly trials. The common fairytale trope works to prove the strength and dedication (love never seems to factor in) of the competitor to the one in possession of his object of desire. It also impresses upon our protagonist the weight of what he’s getting himself into. And it’s not all boys slaying dragons (although it’s a lot of boys slaying dragons). If you happen to be a girl, you can line up outside the castle to present yourself as the most beautiful maiden in the land. If you win, the kingdom is yours. But if you are outshined, you will be drowned in the lake.

Brutal, right? Trial by fire with the highest of stakes. But isn’t it preferable to sitting at home and mailing letters into the void, checking the horizon for a horse-backed messenger every morning for months, not even sure if your courier was waylaid by bandits or delayed in a tavern of ill repute? Isn’t it better than biting your nails down to and past the quick and venting to anyone that will listen that if you could just see the princess, just for a moment, if you could entertain her with stories about your travels to the East and play her that new song on the lute and if she could just see the way this season’s harvest has made your body strong and tan then she would choose you above all the others? Instead of cursing the advantage of men whose fathers are close with the King and can bypass all that red tape, wouldn’t it be better to have the chance to win or lose her on your own merit?

I thought about this a lot when I returned from the Vermont Studio Center to my parents’ house in Connecticut this November. I spent a few days converting the basement into a studio space and then dove headlong into a stream of job applications. (A one-way stream, which carries time and effort and carefully crafted sentences away from you at a very fast pace and returns nothing but new waters.) There has been a lot written lately about how hard it is for us young folk to find jobs, especially in creative fields. The market, especially in New York, is saturated with academically decorated, creative minds and there’s just not that much money in the arts to go around.

After a week of sending out email after email into the web abyss, I spent a day in North Hampton with an artist friend. I was walking his dog, which looked like a tiny, toy luckdragon, down a bustling street and I was afraid someone was going to step on it. Its bones as delicate as a bird’s. “I wish I could just fight a dragon,” I said.

“Huh?” Don said.

“Sometimes I wish I could just fight a dragon or find some really far away herb or walk through a burning forest in some epic, bloody trial to get a job. And if I didn’t make it, fine. But at least I would have a chance to fight for what I want instead of sending out all of these faceless emails.”

“I think you’d be good at fighting a dragon,” he said.

“Thanks. Can I use you as a reference?”

Anyway, “Be careful what you wish for,” etc. etc. I got a call soon after from an artist’s studio. I’ve been a huge fan of this woman’s work and philosophy for years. They asked me to come in and work with a team of assistants to fabricate a large-scale installation. It was pitched as a trial period for a permanent position. I made it sound like I was already in NY, so when they asked if I could start the next morning, I said “Sure!”

In progress installation.

It was already dinnertime, but I called a true friend in Brooklyn (“Can I move in with you tonight and stay with you for an unknown length of time?”), packed in an hour and a half, and worked a seven-day week. It turned out when I got there that the permanent positions were already full. But, long story short, there have been many challenges, obstacles, puzzles and riddles to work through as an assistant. I am still at the studio and, although I don’t know how long it will last, it’s good to know that I’ve had the chance to prove my mettle.

Weaving gold tinsel.