Confessions of a Florentine Pet Sitter

Conversation with Ann T. Pierce – Part II:

Continued from Part I:

The kids were also involved with the development of the Empty Sack series, which started with an innocent painting of orange-packing sacks hanging in the barn of a friend who has an orange orchard. When my family saw the painting, I became literally swamped with bags of all kinds: currency sacks from banks where my two daughters worked; bean and vegetable bags from my son who managed a farmers cooperative; grain sacks from my husband who fed the livestock; sacks another son found at a garage sale in Eugene, Oregon, and the empty sacks (skins) discarded by my third son’s snake. The enthusiasm spread to the wrapping of my Christmas presents in all kinds of sacks, which I opened for the occasion and then repacked for the watercolor paintings.

The first painting of the orange packing sacks was nothing more than a response to form, color, arrangement, and shape. As the paintings progressed, I began to realize that the bags had pregnant, maternal aspects. The sacks my family members were giving me had symbolic relationships to themselves. These paintings occurred at a time when the children were getting married, packing up and leaving home: thus, Empty Sacks.

Tribal Presence, the last painting in the “Sack” series, is really a record of an occasion when the “tribe,” the scattered children, was all back home for Christmas vacation. The word “presence” has a double meaning – the whole family’s attendance as well as the exchange of gifts.

Your paintings are very powerful, visually and emotionally. Has anyone ever said that you paint too powerfully for a woman?

No, but I notice that men are attracted to my paintings. They really seem to like the Southwest scenery. It’s interesting. I don’t know if it’s equally attractive with women.

I’ve thought of my paintings as fairly masculine, especially the most recent Canyons and Upper Bidwell Park series. In a way, it’s the subject, because the Southwest subject itself is very powerful. I feel like what I’m looking at is a masculine subject and that’s what I’m trying to express. And I can’t express that feeling of power and masculinity about the subject without using bold colors and shapes. I paint the way I feel like painting at the time I’m attracted to something. If it’s a gentle subject and I feel like painting that way, then that’s the way I’ll paint it. If it’s a big bold Southwestern scene, I’ll paint it bold.

The subject and content of your work has changed over the years. Is your work influenced by changes in your location, or what you are going through personally, or the art of the times?

My work changes all the time. I’ve been criticized for having so many ways of painting. My first major paintings were abstractions and it seems I’ve come full circle through semi-abstraction, representation, and back to abstraction again; from colorful to subdued and back to colorful. Environment has played a heavy role in its influence on my work. Most of the paintings I did in Colorado were vertical and influenced by the mountainous scenery. In Colorado the mountains went straight up. When I came to California, to this valley, everything turned out to be horizontal.

An artist is influenced by everything. I can remember being inspired by things I read while in school, and it having an influence on what I was going to paint. I was taking an art history class and the image of the Deposition of Christ, an altar piece, stuck with me. I’m not a religious person particularly, but it really made an impression on me. In watercolor class, I did sketch after sketch and many small paintings of this painting. Never in my life had I put so much effort into any thing. This is how my Dad used to paint. He’d do one study after another and toss them away, then do another study, and he’d do tracings and more tracings, and he’d finally get it on the canvas and start painting. I work more like my Mom who was a very spontaneous person and would not even use a pencil; she would just start painting.

Back then, I remember doing all kinds of preparations for this one painting and when I finally completed it, my instructor said, Hand me those sketches, hand me the painting. She took them up to the front of the class, pinned everything up on the board, and said to the class, This is what you should be doing to create a painting. And I didn’t feel that way at all. I learned from that experience that every bit of creativity I had for the painting, for the idea, went into the sketches, and the sketches were wonderful little things. They were spontaneous, but the painting itself was pure drudgery. I got to the point where I felt I could paint it, and it turned out to be just a lot of hard work.

A lot of times, the way you paint has a lot to do with how creative a piece is. Things happen as you paint, you know this, and if you take advantage of those things, make the changes that you need to make, it’s a much more creative experience than doing all these heavy preparatory sketches.

Were you affected by art that was happening around you?

Well, my graduate work at the University was abstract. I’m sure a lot of that was influenced by the abstract expressionists because that was what was happening in the fifties. Jimmy Ernst, the son of Max Ernst, influenced my work. He was an abstract expressionist. I was doing very linear abstractions, not non-objective, but abstractions derived from subject matter, very linear and colorful. Jimmy Ernst taught a summer class at the University of Colorado. He was impressed with what I was doing, and then I realized it was because his stuff was very similar to mine.

Who are some of the painters besides Jimmy Ernst that have influenced you?

Well, I guess if I like them, I’ve been influenced, although I can’t say that I’ve been directly influenced by anyone. One of my favorites is Paul Klee. It’s the abstraction and symbolism in his work. Another more recent influence would be Wolf Kahn.

Kahn uses strong subjective color in his landscapes and his work has a soft textural quality like your recent canyon paintings.

Yes, I guess that’s a very pointed influence. I’ve never felt a direct influence, but I love his work.

Are there other people in your life who have influenced your directions with your art?

All my teachers have given me direction, either by negative or positive criticism that has pushed me in a different ways.

What was one of the biggest pushes?

I was a beginning painting student and one of my first watercolor teachers, the one that hung my stuff up on the wall saying this is the way you should paint, came around to where I was painting. At that time I was using a lot of browns. She said, I like this, but why did you put in the “shit brown”?

That really made an impression on me! I’ve remembered that phrase “shit brown” ever since, and avoid using browns. I tell my students, Watch those neutral colors! I don’t say it the way she did. I tell them to paint in any color they want, but use bright colors to get there. You can get down to any neutral you want with washes and various techniques, layers of colors, and it makes a better neutral than taking it out of a tube.

When you are painting, are you painting for yourself or do you paint for the viewer? What do you want people to get or see when they look at your work?

Usually, I’m painting for myself, but I also want to create a visual image of what I feel for the subject so that other people can see what I saw and perhaps have the same experience.

If they do or don’t get it, does it make a difference?

In some cases it does, because I work so hard to bring across this feeling or idea and if they don’t catch that, sometimes I’m disappointed.

One of my students said to me, I want you to talk to me about this painting. So I told her the technique I used and the subject and how I felt about it, that I loved the fog rolling in over the Butte Creek Canyon, used to take my dad for drives up there, and took lots of photographs.
And she said, Oh, I thought it was an ocean!
Oh, okay.
It does have that feeling and I’m fine with that. That doesn’t distract from the feeling at all. You look out across the canyons and you see the fog and it’s very much like the feeling of an ocean.

It bothers me that people will look at a painting and say, Oh I see a donkey up there in that corner. Do you see that donkey? If I’m still working on it, I’ll take the donkey out!

But anything that has to do with the feeling of the subject, not the subject itself, but the attitudes and the response I have toward the subject, is fine. They may also feel they have a completely different feeling.

So, the experience a viewer brings to a painting contributes to his or her understanding and appreciation of your work?

Yes. I don’t care how they interpret it, it’s their business. But, if they can catch some of that feeling, that’s my communication. That’s what’s important to me.

Can you tell me how you get from idea to finished product?

I get ideas or inspiration from the photographs I’ve taken on location. Photographs are an excellent resource, especially in situations where metamorphosis is a problem; where there is movement or when a constant light source cannot be maintained. I develop understanding through sketches, which are just an arrangement of lines on a small thumbnail scale to work out a composition. Sometimes, I do a little more than that, like a linear or value study. I’ve used the process of blind contour frequently in a relatively slow, methodical technique which not only aids in understanding the form, but also forces the recognition of aspects that might otherwise be missed. That said, however, I’m a firm believer in direct painting as opposed to doing a lot of preliminary work which feels too complete, soaking up all my creative efforts – efforts which really should be evident in the final painting. A painting has to involve the initial creative process.

When you begin, do you have a clear idea of what your image will look like?

No. I can visualize what it might look like when I start, but because it’s developed on the paper as I go along, I make a lot of changes. I flow with those changes, making corrections as I need to, adding or subtracting. If I need light, I’ll add light; if I need dark, I’ll add dark areas. The emphasis is not on the way the subject looks itself, but on the feeling I get from the subject, so if I’m not getting the feeling, then this is where changes are made. Feeling is important. I’m not just painting a representation of what I’m looking at, but I’m painting the way I feel about it.

Do you ever get stuck with certain areas?

All the time. Sometimes, I’ll throw away the whole painting if I can’t resolve it, or I’ll put it away for awhile. There are very few paintings that go from beginning to end without problems. When things do fall into place, I’m always proud of those. There are so few, I can probably count them on the fingers of two hands. Most of the time it’s just hard work and making changes. But, I love it when the spontaneous painting happens, because when it does, you look at it and say to yourself, When did I do that? I don’t remember doing that—because you’re in another world completely. In an altered state. You’re painting, but you don’t realize what you’re doing. I wish that would happen more often!

In your teaching watercolor, what’s one of the most important things you tell your students?

It’s different teaching college and teaching workshops. Because a lot of the students in the college situation don’t know what they’re doing, they need to have special art direction and help in terms of technique. The more advanced students have a direction and know something about paint, but if they don’t know the techniques to start with, they’re lost. They need a basis for understanding design and how to put a painting together, for understanding composition and color. I object to a lot of the recent university level education that I’ve seen because students aren’t being given the basics. You have to know what you’re doing before you can do it; you have to learn technique; and eventually after the technique and the ideas of design and composition are understood, then you’re able to do what you want. And you don’t even think about it, you just paint, just do it. So knowing the basics comes first.

Another thing I try to get across to all the students at the university level and in my workshops is that everyone is going to paint differently. Everyone has their own signature, their own way of writing, and everybody has their own way of holding the brush, putting down the paint, with their own emphasis and development of the painting, i.e. their own way of putting it together. If you have an artist that you like a lot, no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to be able to paint like that artist. You can’t paint like anyone else.

For that reason, I try to make demonstrations as brief as possible. In my art education background I was taught that you don’t demonstrate the whole painting. Another instructor I had in a graduate program did complete paintings in front of the students and there wasn’t one student in that class who painted any differently than the teacher. That made an impression on me, so rather than doing a whole painting and saying this is me, look at what I’m doing with this beautiful painting, what I try to do is demonstrate the technique, a way of holding the brush, a way of beginning, a way of breaking up the space, or ways you can use bright color and overlapping washes. I show students certain techniques, and then turn them loose.

If  I give my students the same problem, every one of their paintings comes out different. Some of the people are beginners and some are experienced painters, but they do their own thing, which is what I think is important.

In the late 1990s Ann participated in a group show at the Chico Art Center, a show that had the largest attendance ever for the Center. Called “Bag Ladies,” the exhibition consisted of work from eleven Chico women artists. All of the works were created and woven around specific proverbs and sayings. I wrongly assumed the women called their group the Bag Ladies because when they painted together, they brought their own bag lunches! But, oh, how wrong I was! Intrigued by the name for its many connotations and associations, I asked Ann about how the Bag Ladies got started and where the name came from:

We are a group of women artists from or near the Chico area who used to get together every Friday during the ’80s at the Chico Art Center to paint. Sometimes we had models or we set up a still life. We just painted together.

In the mean time, my parents had moved to Paradise, and Mom and I would occasionally paint together. Before she moved, she had had cataracts removed. This was before the implant procedure came into being, so her vision was affected terribly by light and she couldn’t go outside to paint. I tried to find things to take up to her that she could paint while remaining indoors. A friend gave me a bunch of old corn that still had its dried husks attached and that was the first thing we shared together. I painted it, and then took the box of corn up to Mother, and she painted it. Then there was a wasp’s nest that a friend gave Mother. She hung it up, painted it, and asked if I would like to paint it. So I did, and we got together to compare paintings again.

I mentioned this to the ladies at the art center and we decided that we would come up with a project—we would each find an object, do a painting of it, then put it in a paper sack or bag and pass the bag to someone else. None of us saw what anyone else was doing until we finished. At that time there were seven of us. Seven bags and seven people meant there would be 49 paintings we were supposed to do! Not all of us finished, of course, but finally we got together to look at everything, had a glass of champagne, and talked about the paintings. It was such fun to see how different people reacted towards the same subjects.

The second time we put different objects in the sacks and passed the bags around, we decided to have a show. The show was held at the Vagabond Rose in Chico in 1997. It was a very successful show.

In this recent Bag Ladies show, Ann not only had several works from her current series of Canyon paintings as well as the “Bag Ladies” paintings, but she also had a three dimensional rock installation which consisted of near perfect spherical yet naturally formed rocks laid out from the largest to smallest in two rows, with minute visible changes from one rock to another. But, when all together in a line, a distinct difference in size from first to last was evident. Inherent in the roundness of the rocks was nature’s sense of perfection, pattern and design; the natural order of things. Ann says when she looks for a cohesive thread in her own work over the years, she sees that there is a “…consistency—not in the intent or the visual images, nor in the technical presentation itself, but in a basic sense of order, or, if you prefer, organic unity or design.” She knows this order and design when she sees it in nature, and deftly creates it in her artwork, whether in painting or in collecting rocks!

Is the rock installation something new for you?

Yes, it took two and a half years to get that together and there’s more of it over there on my kitchen counter and two sets in the studio. It was a fun thing to do. I’d go out with the dogs to the Channel and other places, like the creeks around Chico, and every time I saw a rock I liked, I’d pick it up. I found that the rocks I was picking up were as round as I could get. Then I started organizing them and reorganizing them. I had two sets going at once. I’d take one rock and place it in the other line if it fit better.

When you were collecting and organizing rocks, did you think of it as an art project?

No. I’ve done very little three dimensional work, but really enjoyed it. It was just fun, and I loved the feel of them. Then, with this last Bag Ladies’ show, where we worked around the sayings and proverbs, I thought, well, I can use the rocks for one of the proverbs in the show. After the show was over, I moved the rock piece to the Chico Museum where a high school teacher at Pleasant Valley High had put together a show to help her students learn how to set up an exhibition and judge shows. The title of the show was “Chico Scene.” Everybody submitted things that had to do with Chico, so I entered the rocks; it’s all Chico. I didn’t know if it would be accepted.

How is creating that three dimensional piece different from creating a painting? Or is it?

Not much. It’s a matter of selectivity, you know. Trying to put things together in the order in which you want them. It isn’t that different, except the rocks were more easily changed. I could just move them. With a painting, you can’t do that.

And, in that sense, it is a living, evolving piece. It could still change, every time you find a new rock.

Yes. It can.

Another continually evolving and productive project for Ann, like her own painting, is the scholarship fund she set up in the name of her mother, Frances Trucksess. Our conversation began with Ann telling me about an exhibition she and Marlys Williams, then curator of the BMU Upstairs Gallery on campus, pulled together of Ann’s many paintings that had been loaned out to various departments on the Chico campus over the thirty-one years of her teaching career. It was a difficult endeavor because in the course of their search, they discovered that many of the departments had moved to new buildings and taken the paintings with them. In order to find them, they first had to find the new locations of all the departments, and then they had to convince people to let go of the paintings for the show. Many people, who didn’t want to give up their treasured paintings, wound up purchasing them. In their search, Ann and Marlys collected over 72 pieces which were finally hung in the Upstairs Gallery. The proceeds from the sale of the works went towards the Fran Trucksess Watermedia Scholarship at CSU Chico.

Ann T. Pierce, Professor Emeritus, California State University at Chico, currently resides in Chico, California, and continues to work on her own painting projects and teach workshops out of her own studio.