Multiples have been much on my mind lately. Maybe it’s because I’ve recently given birth to a son—an original print of my very own. Becoming a parent inevitably makes you see with new eyes, affirming an ability that’s necessary in any creative process. If you’re an artist who becomes a parent, your perceptions change and multiply. This new relationship affects the way you view others’ artwork, it affects the way you want your offspring to understand visual language, and it affects the way you want your child to see you as an artist.
Of course, the biblical edict to be fruitful and multiply is taken very seriously by visual artists, albeit in a different way. Creativity is what being an artist is all about—not the end product, necessarily, but the process of creation. Two current shows in town deal with this very issue. “Multiplicity: New Directions in Contemporary Printmaking, Artist’s Books, and Other Multiples,” showing at Vanderbilt’s Fine Arts Gallery through Oct. 18, focuses on the original print and the processes by which editions of prints are made, whether it’s relief printing (on a raised surface, such as a woodcut), planographic processes (on the surface itself, as in lithography), or intaglio (in a lowered surface, as in etching). The other exhibit, at Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Gallery through Sept. 25, is “An Artist’s Marathon: Paintings on Paper by Dean Nimmer.”
In the latter case, “multiples” refers to the sheer number of works Nimmer has created. Starting in 1995, Nimmer challenged himself to create 1,000 drawings as a way to explore his own creative process. He has since produced more than 2,000 drawings, 300 of which are currently on view at Sarratt. (More are also on display at the Museum Support Services Gallery in Cummins Station.) As opposed to the “Multiplicity” exhibit, in which a specific process is so integral to each piece, Nimmer’s work is about overall enjoyment. “You can look at them as individual pieces,” he says, “or you can look at them as a wall, but it really represents a passion about making things.”
Pieces with feminist themes comprise one aspect of the “Multiplicity” exhibit. As an artist who has framed some of my own work in the same context, I found Lesley Dill’s print—if you can call it that—to be especially evocative. Though it doesn’t follow any of the more traditional printmaking techniques, the piece—sort of a monoprint—is a multiple in that it is reproduced from a blueline each time it’s assembled. A silhouette of a woman’s body is replicated on the gallery wall using cast nails and pins. Beneath it are the words “I lose myself and am alone with no message beyond song.” On the most obvious level, the work appears to address the brutality of society’s often conflicting views of the female body, and to offer a metaphor for a sane response.
I understood the paradox differently, however. Having just given over my body and time to the birth of an infant, I’ve learned that such numbing fatigue and often inexpressible joy can sometimes only be conveyed in musical metaphors—the “song” to which Dill refers. When the symbol becomes the only accurate message, visual or musical language can sometimes be more appropriate than words. Clearly, the message in such a work changes for each viewer—another way, perhaps, in which this show addresses multiples.
The same is surely true of Lorna Simpson’s “Three Wishes.” A three-dimensional piece, it too stretches the idea of printmaking; it’s a lovely wooden box containing three wishbones, each expertly crafted from a different material. The ceramic one snaps, the rubber one bends, and the bronze one can be manipulated in a number of ways. The bones don’t so much represent wishes, though, as the potential that may lie in a given situation, depending on how it’s approached. I think of these things more often now as I fumble through learning to parent.
Simpson’s piece, as well as others in the show, was commissioned by Peter Norton, a software developer and publisher of Norton Utilities. Each year, he commissions work by an artist and distributes it internationally. Another Norton commission, “One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas” by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, consists of brightly colored playing cards, each with some kind of word or statement meant to encourage the creative process. Translated into six languages—English, Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, and Russian—some of the cards read: “Is the style right?” “Would anyone want it?” “Be dirty.” “Question the heroic.” “Go to an extreme, come partway back.” “Use unqualified people.”
Dean Nimmer, professor of painting and drawing at Massachusetts College of Art, responds to a self-imposed set of injunctions like those on Eno’s and Schmidt’s cards. He’s less interested in technique than in following a blind instinct to understand his own creative process. “I think if I have something to offer as an artist,” he says, “it’s sharing the joy of the experience more than being impressed with technique, or how well I render something, or how good the composition is. It’s about the joy of the process rather than the image itself.”
Though Nimmer’s statement suggests that the image itself is somewhat secondary, the opposite is true. His drawings constitute a visual diary in symbolic language: Sometimes the viewer can find a narrative, but it’s not story in the traditional sense. In one set of drawings, for instance, Nimmer says he started with a square, then drew other forms, until he ended up with a series of robots.
“Where there is a namable subject,” he says, “there’s a visual connection between forms. One of the hard things about art for some people is that you’re feeling something that you can’t put into words. Even these are not just about robots. They are and they aren’t. They are as much generated by what I can do with materials.”
During the all-day public drawing marathon that accompanied the opening of Nimmer’s exhibit at Sarratt, I played with materials myself. As I smeared vine charcoal and floated red watercolor on a piece of paper, I thought of those “100 Worthwhile Dilemmas.” In my own way, I was being “dirty.” Nimmer’s 7-year old daughter, in fact, typically refers to his work as his “messy drawings,” then joins him in the mess.
The experience made me realize how much I want my new son to join me in making art. I want him to know there is a language beyond words. And I want him to know that I am an “unqualified person”—that we all are—because to be truly whole, as Madeleine L’Engle once said, is to let go of whatever we consider to be our qualifications. As she puts it, “I do not need to be ‘qualified’ to play a Bach fugue, but I cannot play that Bach fugue at all if I do not play the piano daily, if I do not practice my finger exercises.” The gift to create is free; the responsibility lies in being fruitful and continuing to honor it.
