September 2020
CBC radio “q”
May 2020
The Tyee
In your social media, you talk about your quest to purchase a property in B.C. to live on and to offer live-work space for creators hoping to make art that changes the world. Can you tell me about your Free Artist Residency?
The basis of it started when I began to earn extra money from my painting. The idea became conjoined with the need to find a place to live, which would probably have to be outside of Vancouver. (The property will be legally bequeathed to a yet-to-be-named activist group to continue on with the residency program. It’s a key part of the equation, another angle to subverting property ownership.)
The hunt became a part of the project. I frequently post ideas for specific locations and actual houses that are for sale. I’ve put a couple of offers in on houses and then managed to get out of them when I realized they weren’t appropriate.
I’ve been to look at a handful of places and reported back to people on Facebook. I’ll show some photos and they’ll say, “It looks like the foundation might be wonky.” In this way it’s become a real community enterprise. I’m creating something subversive in that most people don’t buy a house and involve a few thousand other people in the process and then sort of threaten to invite them all to come over and stay awhile.
June 2019
Artists I Admire
by Jes Reyes
“When we make things we find our associates and allies. We find our communities, and everything that comes along with that, including the power to resist and reasons for actual joy.”
Jean Smith is a Vancouver-based painter, writer and singer whose band Mecca Normal is regarded as an inspiration to the 1990s social movement known as Riot Grrrl. Her contemporary portraits, based on photographs, are about complex emotions related to feminism and anti-capitalism. She sells the 11 x 14″ series for $100 USD on Facebook, making her work accessible to artists, musicians and writers she’s met along the way. Sales above her monthly expenses go towards opening the Free Artist Residency for Progressive Social Change off the west coast of Canada. Jean is a published novelist and a two-time recipient of Canada Council for the Arts awards.
What’s your lifestyle like as an artist? How would you describe your daily routine?
I get up around 5:30 a.m. and I aim to begin painting by 8:00 every morning. This usually happens. I paint until around 11:00, photograph the finished painting, and post it on FaceBook. I sell up to 30 paintings a month, so there is a lot of packaging involved. Groceries, cooking, walking, on the phone with my elderly father (93), hatching plans on the phone with my friend, artist David Lester. I’m not anti-social, but, at this point in my life (60), I’m not that interested in going out to events at night.
When did you start painting portraits? Why portraits? Who are the people you paint?
I started painting self-portraits in 1973 when I was 13. Both my parents were painters, but neither painted people at all. My dad was an art director for an ad agency who sometimes hired models for various campaigns, so I had both a curiosity and a kind of inside vantage point of how women are used to sell coffee or whatever. I studied my own face in the mirror and painted myself in a way that ran contrary to the perfection and abject beauty of models. From then on, I attempted to paint at least one self-portrait a year, but I didn’t really show people until I was invited to exhibit laser copies of my teenage self-portraits in the Ladyfest art show in Olympia, Washington in 2000. In a way I’m just picking up where I left off.
I use photos I find online as a reference. It doesn’t matter who it is because it’s not really a painting of them. I look for strong faces photographed in light that defines specific features from perspectives I prefer. I do screengrabs if I see something while I’m watching a film.
I’m more interested in painting emotions rather than features, but the emotions aren’t necessarily in the photo. I keep painting until all the elements work together. I have a good sense of knowing when to stop – although, it’s not fool-proof. I’ve definitely painted beyond when I should have stopped and regretted it.
Whenever I do specific likenesses (usually a request) I end up in a quagmire of allowing their feelings about the person enter into my awareness. It’s a long time to stand there wondering how they feel about their nose or their chin or whatever. It’s just not that interesting. I’d rather be thinking about what works in the painting. I suppose it’s like the difference between writing fiction and non-fiction. Once you develop skills for telling a good story, sticking to the facts is kind of boring.
I hate the point in a when I’m forced to sacrifice a great bit of painting to push it more towards looking like a specific person. I’m way more interested in what I discover as I’m working – how every element affects every other element – watching this happen, changing things, compensating elsewhere. Extreme looking! Elements being: composition, color, perspective, light, style (bits of realism plunked into abstraction), features on the face – nose, mouth, eyes primarily – and the overarching awareness that personality is more important than beauty.
You have been raising funds through your portrait making to start an artist residency? Can you tell me more about this project? How do we buy a portrait to support you?
I’ll be opening the Free Artist Residency for Progressive Social Change in 2020. I had hoped to buy a place outright, but now I’m considering a mortgage situation because the location I want to be in is more expensive than simply buying the crappiest house in the province outright. There are very good reason to be on one of the gulf islands off the west coast of Canada. Basically, it will be for artists in any discipline who are working on projects that intend to change the world. I need space for the writer’s cabin. Soundproofed rehearsal studio. Painting studio. Accommodation etc. I’m getting very close now! I’ll be the owner and it will be legally bequeathed an activist art group yet to be named.
When I realized I was making more money than I needed, I decided to bring my FaceBook audience into the process, making them aware that first, the paintings are both very good and very cheap, and, at this point, only available from me. They want to see the residency program realized. Many of them will want to come and stay there.
All sales above my $1000 USD monthly expenses go towards buying property and opening the facility. I post totals throughout the month saying how much has been raised. Lately I’ve been selling between 20 and 30 paintings a month, so I’ve been able to set aside between $1000 and $2000 a month added to family money that has come to me, keeping in mind that my parents lived in a mobile home park.
I don’t want to feel like I’ve accepted donations from people who then have expectations about any of this. Supporters at this point are basically buying a painting and I’m telling them where the money will go. I’m a bit surprised that there hasn’t been any kind of infusion of funds or offers of assistance for the project. People seem to want it to happen, but only one person officially donated $100 USD on an IndieGoGo campaign I ran. Granted, I was steering people away from using the campaign platform to avoid fees, and there definitely were escalated sales at that time, but that was my big push and it fell flat. But hey, I set up the parameters for how funds are to be raised, and people are buying paintings; it’s just that I’m at a point now where I want to get on with opening the facility. Plus, I have 300 paintings in stock. That’s $30,000 USD I could really use right now. So I’ll put it out there: I need $100,000 USD to purchase a facility that can be up and running before the snow flies. I have 35 years worth of intense cultural activism, a high percentage of follow through on projects I start, and public accountability regarding my intentions and integrity. I don’t want to piddle along for another two years raising funds when I could be operating a facility for artists to come and stay for free on an amazing island in Canada by October, 2019. Philanthropists, ahoy!
Back to Steve. He understands the potential. He equated it to a specific person who helped individuals fleeing persecution during World War II. As a gesture of gratitude to Steve, I sent him a painting I wasn’t going to sell that I knew he liked. He made a great video of himself opening the package before he went to the Bikini Kill show in LA! The world needs more Steves! Send me your Steves!
Steve Sherlock unboxing a Jean Smith painting
I know other people get it. I know everyone has their own dream and there isn’t a bunch of money around for the arts, but I also want to challenge how land is usually bought and held by individuals. I want to be in a position to extend what I have enjoyed about the community I’ve been in for 35 years. When we make things we find our associates and allies. We find our communities, and everything that comes along with that, including the power to resist and reasons for actual joy.
Almost a year ago the apartment building where I’ve enjoyed low rent for 25 years was put up for sale. I won’t be able to pay the going rate for another rental situation in Vancouver, and, with my painting taking off, I need more space. I don’t actually want to leave Vancouver. I was born here, my friends are here, my band is here, my elderly father is here (I keep an eye on him), so it’s weird to be pushed out, but I can see myself living on one of the islands. A certain number of musicians I know – and a recording engineer we’ve worked with – live on the one I’m looking at, but basically cannot afford a place. I ripped over there a week or so ago to look at a single-wide mobile on a sloped lot with very little usable land. The agent believed it would sell for more than listed price, which was already a lot more than I have. Like $40,000 USD more. I ripped back home and painted up a storm, but I could use some help painting myself out of this corner. I’m open to various ideas for financial structuring, while being protective of the fact that I need to paint and sell my work. I can’t get swept into anything too complicated.
I imagine other political artists will be pushed out of where they are (in one way or another) and I want to have a place available for those situations, so it isn’t exclusively a time away from chaotic life to focus on work. I will be able to offer a place for various circumstances within a very broad community of political artists.
I don’t have a partner or kids, so I’m inventing my role within my artistic community in a tangible and useful way. It’s like with my paintings; people frequently tell me to increase the price form $100 USD (11 x 14″) but I really like being able to put good art into the hands of people who don’t normally see themselves as buyers of art. The vast majority of my buyers are women (usually in their 40s and 50s) and the faces I paint are almost all female or ambiguous. As an older woman, the freedom I allow myself in painting and the experiences I’ve had are there, in the painting. I’ve had a lifetime of expression writing novels and singing on 13 albums with my great collaborator David Lester on guitar.
I post paintings first on FaceBook, so people can friend me there (and tell me they saw this interview) or email me directly after looking at paintings currently available on my artist website.
What artist residencies or other resources have supported you as an artist?
Receiving two grants from the Canada Council for the Arts to write two different novels was extremely important to me. It gave me time and confidence.
Because I’m a known person in indie music and resistance culture, I have a certain amount of reach in place. I get a lot of support from individuals who tell me that my work has been meaningful to them over the years. I’m not much on joining existing groups.
For me, social media has been the way forward. I keep up it as it occurs, from Friendster to MySpace – and now FaceBook etc. I’ve made websites and hundreds of videos (YouTube and Vimeo), so I had everything I needed to get my paintings in front of people. What I didn’t know was how much people would like them and want to buy faces of non-specific people. Total surprise! The first one I posted sold immediately and then I had someone offering to pay me in advance for the next one! That’s where the series started. With a painting of my guitar player’s wife in a big black hat. I didn’t think looked enough like her, so I didn’t show it to them. I liked it as a stand-alone painting, but I thought the hat also had a lot to do with its appeal, so I painted women in hats for a long time. It was a big deal for me to move on to the “No Hat” series, but no there have been about 625 of those along with a bunch of other sub series like scuba divers, pioneers of aviation, astronauts, headphones etc.
For the 10 or so years prior to painting being my focus, I was writing novels (two are about online dating) and I frequently wrote about and posted stories about dates, jobs and family. So I inadvertently built up an audience that way. Friends of the band, cultural activists – people I’ve met along the way. I was writing in the early morning then going to various joe jobs (a gym for women, retail) that paid my bills while I waited for my agent to sell one of my manuscripts (still waiting!). I had a really awful boss in a store situation, but when I quit I had some trouble finding anything suitable, so one day, out of desperation, I posted on FaceBook that I was going to paint every day (actually, I think I said I’d do 5 paintings a day) and sell them for $100 USD. That was January 2016 and I’m still on track.
You have explored a variety of themes through your art, such as politics, gender, patriarchy, and dating. What kind of topics have you been attracted to exploring right now?
Well, at 60, when it comes to themes, I’m not really exploring, per se. I’m always interested in creating political art that functions as direct action, but that’s a tough mandate. I don’t have much truck with party politics, but I have created paintings about women’s rights, Water Defenders at Standing Rock, Pussy Riot and several other fairly literal approaches, but my forte is more nuanced work and I consider the work I have done in music and elsewhere carries over as information that can be applied to my painting. Because I have a strong background in song lyrics (both the very direct and the oblique and ambiguous), and novels (with both political and more nuanced plots and characters), I recognize that I can’t control how my paintings are regarded. I don’t like to be overly literal. If I use text in a piece it’s usually not integral to any meaning viewers may want to impose on the work – like, for instance, if I put the word ‘hotel’ on a painting of an attractive woman, it doesn’t mean she’s a sex worker, but those are features that the viewer must regard and grapple with, or not. If I put the word ‘pool’ in a painting of an attractive woman wearing a bathing cap, it doesn’t follow that we can assume her out-of-frame body is one way the other, in a bikini. These are way to nudge a viewer towards considering what isn’t ‘said’ in the painting. Likewise with gender. Probably best not to assume faces with visible make-up are women. My FaceBook audience is very savvy. I’ve painted a good many trans models and many more where I feel the features are more male, but there is almost always some kind of mask. It was funny the other night when a friend PM’d me wanting to buy the ‘three with the masks’ and I was thinking: they all have masks. She meant the astronauts, but it made me realize how much paint itself is a mask as I apply it to create features and emotions, altering the mask until it resonates as finished.
I don’t tend to use the titles in a clever way or as clarification. I know that’s very popular right now – and as a writer it seems like a natural fit to be calling feminine paintings “Robert” or whatever – but it’s just too easy to flip the script and lose the ambiguity. Then it starts to feel like a gimmick. Then I’m the person painting men dressed as women, when what I want to achieve is a more spontaneous acceptance of other qualities than the instantaneous gravitation to identifying which of two genders a person in a painting is. For god’s sake… does a painting have to have a gender?
You practice in multiple mediums. Does your music, writing, short filmmaking, and painting influence each other?
Absolutely! The longer I paint, the more I’ve become aware that it is an extension of building characters in novels. And, of course, I have a long history of extracting sections form novels and turning them into song lyrics.
How have your experiences as a touring musician impacted or influenced your visual art?
Being in a band that tours impacts all of my creativity. Playing live in front of an audience is such a luxury. Creating art in this way, when you can feel how it’s affecting people right there is instructive and it imposes an accountability that doesn’t exist in the same way in art forms created in solitude. A live event requires that you consider the temperament of the audience, at the very least.
Mecca Normal (Jean Smith & David Lester)
The way I’ve set up my painting empire has some of that performance energy. Sometimes when I finish a painting I can’t wait to post it! To get a reaction to it! Sometimes it sells right away and other times it might be slow to get ‘likes’, but all of this has to be processed in the same way a performance in front of an audience needs to be processed. There are so many unknowable variables as to why songs and paintings might not connect with an audience in any kind of live setting like a club or on FaceBook. There has to be a certain acknowledgement of that unknowableness.
In both arenas it’s great to be able to read an audience and make changes as necessary. With painting, I can feel people waiting to see what I do next. I never like to do any sort of replica of the most popular ones, but I do spontaneously delve into series that stop and start and may or may not be particularly successful, which I try not to let impact what I do next. I was recently doing a series call Sun Hats, painting the shadow on the face under the brim of big straw hat. They weren’t really getting a lot of reaction, but I wanted to keep painting it. Some months later, someone came along and bought 3 of them, but overall I think having been in a band that set out to change the world rather than entertain people set me up really well to conduct a business where I’m not derailed by people’s reaction or lack of reaction.
When I started the “Affirmative” series of astronauts, people were snapping those up and I did end up doing maybe 30 of them because I was really enjoying painting the helmet, but I will also admit that it was a thrill to have them sell as soon as they were posted and because the image was a deviation from my regular work, I felt I could keep going for as long as there was interest in astronauts. So, that was something almost like commercial art, I felt, but it was interesting to see this sort of intensity for a particular painting and so, I wanted to see how it was going to pan out without me limiting supply.
There are currently still a few of them available. Eventually the fervor died down and now they’re just in with the other paintings available. I guess it was something that was generated within the confines of my FaceBook audience, something that I’m actually not trying to re-create. I’m not looking for the next “Affirmative” in the same way that I don’t want to increase my prices just because that’s what’s supposed to happen. Also, even if I doubled the price, they’d still be way too low.
“Affirmative #6” (11 x 14 acrylic on canvas panel, 2018)
I’m really interested in the idea that the people who were early supporters find that they eventually have something worth much more than they paid for it, which is likely to happen whether or not I raise my prices. I’ve had so many incredible experiences in music that I’m not really looking to get the same thrill by being in a gallery. I know my work is good. I prefer making unique situations viable in D-I-Y economies. That’s more of a thrill to me. I’m not saying I won’t go with a gallery at some point and move along to some other enterprise, either much larger paintings or maybe running the artist residency will replace painting and that will be fine. For the last 3 years, I’ve been alone in this room an awful lot. It works for me, but there are other things to do in life.
It’s likely that something will change and there won’t be $100 USD paintings posted almost every day. Cripes… there are over 300 in stock. That alone could eat away at my self-worth. All these great paintings and because my audience is basically limited to my FaceBook friends, they pick and choose and let 10 good ones go by, before a few sell. Some days that alone is really annoying. At $100 USD I figure they should all sell immediately, but it has always been about half. Actually, it has just recently increased to about a third remaining in stock.
It’s interesting that there are fewer sales around the end and beginning of the month as people pay bills and also Christmas has been slow because I guess $100 USD is a bit expensive if you have a lot of gifts to buy, but really, these are damn good paintings and at some point something will make them too expensive for the people who are currently have fairly exclusive access to them. In May, I sold 20 to an interior designer who is now selling them in her store, but I don’t know for how much. That’s fine with me. I can be regarded as a wholesaler. I’m both an artist and an entrepreneur. There’s creativity in both areas. I figure the situation is in a state of flux. I just want to keep painting and paying my bills, but the whole thing has turned out to be way more than that.
What’s one question you wished someone would ask you?
Interviewer: “Jean, you’re funny, smart, and sexy as I’ll get out – how is it possible that you’re single?”
Jean: “Why you narrow-minded little twit! I oughta… !!! Wait… what?”
Do you have a question for me? You can ask me anything!
I love the painting you bought. It was one that was supposed to be a specific likeness. A fellow wanted a painting of his partner who is quite strikingly beautiful. I told him I wasn’t taking commissions, but I gave it a try without him knowing it. I went over and over the features trying to get it to look like her, but, along the way, some fantastic things happened and I just couldn’t bring myself to lose them, so it ended up looking a bit like her, but in a very unflattering way. I didn’t show him because it would have been too weird. I posted it on FaceBook and he may have seen something of her in it. She might have seen it and wondered if I had some beef with her. I wondered (and worried) about how they might see it.
My questions: Do you as a buyer want to know the painting’s history in this way? Is it of any interest? Would you prefer not to know it? Does knowing the back-story change how you see it – in either a positive or negative way? Did you suspect there was any particular drama associated with the painting? Does it show?
Oh, are you aware of the Jealous Curator’s blog? She’s from here, so I’m wondering if she’s known beyond my scope. At one point in 2017, when my sales dropped off, I emailed her a bit of a pitch and hoped she’d eventually read it and maybe consider posting my paintings on her blog. Well, she wrote back immediately saying she loved them and she featured them a day or so after and my sales went through the roof. Many of those people have since bought second and third paintings.
“Singer #4” (11 x 14 acrylic on canvas panel, 2017) to be included as an example of dry brush technique in a book being published in the UK. Also featured on the Jealous Curator’s blog.
So those are two questions, but I realize they are more about me than about you, and I guess that’s because I’m focusing on answering questions about myself. In a more normal dynamic, I’d be asking you about your work and the history of the blog and… everything else.
April 2022
by Tamra Lucid
Artistic Independence and Social Media: Interview with DIY Multimedia Icon Jean Smith
In the spring of 2016, multimedia artist Jean Smith — best known as the singer in the iconic underground rock band Mecca Normal — quit her part time job in the garden department of a Vancouver Home Depot to sell her paintings online. Over the next 22 months, the quality of her work, her history as a cultural activist, and her experience in D.I.Y. promotion contributed to her selling 300 of her intentionally under-priced 11 x 14″ portrait paintings directly from her Facebook page. In discussing her success, Jean is the first to say she’s lucky she found a sweet spot that allows first-time art buyers and Mecca Normal fans to own her original work.
Jean’s paintings have also been purchased by art instructors from the Art Institute of Chicago, a university art museum curator, and by art critics for both Artforurm Magazine and the Winnipeg Free Press. Connecting with buyers looks simple enough. Jean completes a painting, takes a photo of it, and posts it on Facebook. Some have sold within an hour.
If you know the Jean Smith story you’ll enjoy hearing it told again. If not, you’re about to learn a lot about the history of the underground.
Vancouver, Canada, 1984: Jean Smith and David Lester started a band — an aggressively feminist guitar and voice duo — called Mecca Normal. Jean had a zine called Smarten Up! which she turned into a record label to release their first LP after only a handful of local shows. First gig? Opening for hardcore punk legends D.O.A. In 1986 and 87, with the loan of D.O.A.’s old school bus, Mecca Normal formed The Black Wedge to tour with other minimalist musicians and poets as an international anti-authoritarian event with an angry political message.
The Black Wedge toured down the west coast and crossed an American heartland that was rocking out to the heavy bubblegum of hair metal. But they attracted compatriots like Bob Dylan’s mentor David Whitaker and San Francisco writer Peter Plate. They got involved with K Records, a new label in Olympia, WA, which grew into one of the great indie labels of the 90s. David designed iconic punk rock album covers. Jean began publishing her writing in chapbooks and began to write music-related articles for various publications including the Village Voice and Your Flesh.
From the first, Mecca Normal received extreme reactions from reviewers. Comparisons to Woody Guthrie, descriptions of Mecca Normal recordings as “riveting” and “radical” were balanced by critics who called them the worst thing they ever heard, one comparing their music to an insect. But one of the beauties of Mecca Normal from the start is that Jean and David have never been in it for the money, or glory. “When we get negative reviews, all it really serves to do is make me more determined to do more of whatever bugs people,” Jean told the Montreal Mirror in 1993.
What do I mean exactly by multimedia artists you may ask? Jean has designed all of Mecca Normal’s 20-plus record covers. By 1990 she was also experimenting with film. Her video for the Mecca Normal song “20 Years/No Escape” won the experimental video award at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona. That year Kathleen Hanna’s Bikini Kill fanzine featured an interview with Jean headlined: “Mecca Normal: it makes me wanna cry, I am so glad they exist.” In 1990 Mecca Normal played CBGB’s, and shows with Fugazi and Mudhoney.
On a postcard Kathleen Hanna sent to David Lester in 1991 she wrote: “The stuff you recorded in Jan. has changed the quality of my life.” Kathleen later told Network Toronto: “I wouldn’t be in a band if I hadn’t heard of Jean.” Fellow Bikini Kill founder Tobi Vail wrote in her zine Jigsaw: “To me, Mecca Normal is one of the only true punk bands around, in that way they are totally subversive. Maybe that is why so many of today’s young white males and their friends enjoy telling me how much they suck. I can’t think of anyone else who writes more powerful songs about what it feels like to be a woman in a world of violence against women.” The Village Voice agreed: “I don’t know of any other rock ’n’ roll so closely attuned to the realities of women’s rage.”
In ’91 Mecca Normal played at the six day long International Pop Underground Convention, the musical event that introduced the world to Olympia’s D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself) methodology and riot grrrl. Jean also performed solo during the women only “Revolution Girl Style Now” opening night show singing a Mecca Normal song and playing guitar with her feet. In their coverage of the event Rolling Stone raved: “At the North Shore Surf Club, guitarist David Lester erected a complex one-man wall of sound, while singer-poet Jean Smith dramatically demonstrated her superb range and control, finishing off with a feedback dance (literally) on guitar.” On the International Pop Underground Convention live album, Bratmobile can be heard introducing their set by saying Mecca Normal is “my punk rock dream come true.”
Kill Rock Stars Records launched with a compilation that year and Mecca Normal was one of the artists included. Nirvana sent out newsletters to their fan club members claiming that Kurt would be doing a duet with Jean: “Islands in the Stream”. By 1992 USA Today, Seventeen Magazine and the L.A. Times interviewed Jean about riot grrrl and women in rock. Mecca Normal’s third album, Dovetail, hit #5 on the Canadian national charts.
In 1993 David Lester started his small press Get To The Point, to publish Jean Smith’s first novel “I Can Hear Me Fine”. Combining forces, Jean later became editor of Smarten Up! & Get To The Point. They’ve published chapbooks of poetry, political writing and artwork by community activists. One book won a major award, and another was selected as one of the top five poetry chapbooks in Canada. Jean is a two-time recipient of Canada Council for the Arts awards as an author of creative fiction, who is currently waiting patiently for her literary agent to find her a publisher. Writing novels (literary fiction) took the majority of Jean’s time between 2000 and 2015, resulting in four complete manuscripts yet to see the light of day.
“Mecca Normal has inspired a large movement of feminists in their teens and early 20s who call themselves Riot Grrrls,” wrote The New York Times. “Female punk rock fans become united by the feminist messages shouted by bands such as Mecca Normal,” added USA Today.
Sonic Youth asked Mecca Normal to play a show with them in Seattle. Alternative Press did a two-page spread on Mecca Normal. Rolling Stone featured them in the Guide to the Coolest Music and Artists Making It, alongside Liz Phair and Radiohead. Jean flew to Boston to tape ABC’s Night Talk with Jane Whitney for a show about Women In Rock. Maury Povich and Esquire Magazine wanted to talk to Jean. The list of labels that have released Mecca Normal’s music is the cream of 90s indie labels: K, Kill Rock Stars, Sub Pop, Matador.
But then the bottom dropped out of the Seattle music biz specifically, and not long after, out of the music biz generally. The national level of attention disappeared. The all ages clubs and other progressive music networks so many indie bands depended on closed down all across the United States.
When the indie touring circuit disappeared Mecca Normal innovated a new way to tour. Their “How Art & Music Can Change the World” lecture and performance event in the early 2000s included high school and university classrooms, art galleries and bookstores as venues. In 2009, Mecca Normal’s 25th anniversary tour — 25 shows in 25 days — was split between conventional rock venues and classrooms.
Jean’s writing for Smashpipe in 2013 about her experiences with online dating are simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, achieving a level of human angst that brings to mind Beckett’s take on the human condition. In 2014 for Democracy Now! Amy Goodman interviewed Jean and David about the inclusion of their art in a Whitney Biennial exhibit about war protester Malachi Ritscher. Mecca Normal opened for The Julie Ruin (a band that includes two members of Bikini Kill) at three shows on the west coast in 2016. In September of this year, The Jealous Curator featured five of Jean’s paintings on her much-loved contemporary art website.
From MySpace through YouTube to Facebook Jean and David have always been on the cutting edge of new media delivering their self evident message that “Anti-authoritarianism is announced in D.I.Y. productivity.”
The success of her paintings has allowed her to quit her job and brought her praise from the art community. The paintings themselves are social media, connecting and reconnecting Jean with friends old and new. As Jean shares her latest paintings on Facebook, she allows her fans to follow the rapid evolution of her work. Songwriter, activist, novelist, filmmaker, painter, event organizer, editor, musician, frontwoman, and constant source of inspiration, Jean Smith is a trailblazer.
Tamra Lucid: Where do you look for inspiration for your $100 USD painting series?
Jean Smith: Once I realized that my paintings didn’t have to be of anyone in particular, I looked for strong faces photographed in light that defined specific features from perspectives I prefer to paint. Photos on the internet and screen-grabs if I see something I’m watching online. I’ve painted several transgender models, glamorous film stars from the 50s, but once I started painting universal emotions rather than features, I felt less compelled to replicate features. Sometimes my Facebook friends ask if it’s so-and-so and I reply, then delete the comment so everyone can see it how they choose to. It’s never very much about pre-existing personalities. Let’s say I paint Bridget Bardot — which I have — but my objective has more to do with emotions that aren’t essentially expressed on her face in the photo. My paintings hold multiple tensions and micro-energies that transcend the split second of the shutter opening and closing. There’s added emotional history involved because of who I am and how she looks. To me, these women don’t look markedly different when painted by a feminist, but maybe viewers are seeing things that are basically just normal to me. As with our band — a feminist rock duo of electric guitar and voice. Mecca Normal seems totally normal to me, but a lot of other people think we’re really weird. To me, it’s exactly the right form of expression.
How did the series begin?
Actually, I began painting self-portraits when I was 13, in the 1970s. Both my parents are painters, and my dad was also an ad agency art director in the 60s and 70s working with models on print media ad campaigns for Nabob coffee etc. He flew from Vancouver to NYC to use top photographers and models. One of the photographers was John Rawlings, who shot over 200 Vogue and Glamour covers. My dad ventured from the limited resources of Vancouver to NYC of his own volition, found Rawlings through some strange set of circumstances and began hiring him to work on his ad agency accounts. He also bought me incredible clothes — or at least one dress in particular that I recall. It was made out of beautiful linen with a very dark blue skirt that you never would have seen on a dress here where girls’ clothes were all pink and frilly, it seemed. He also heard a lot of jazz at clubs like the Hickory House, and he brought home jazz records including Marian McPartland — which I think I took note of. A woman playing jazz piano as the leader of a trio, being taken seriously. He’s also a huge fan of my mother’s paintings. They’re both great painters, but I think it was good for me to hear him enthuse about her work. I had a unique vantage point behind the scenes of both painting and advertising content.
My painting was a very private thing at that point, as a teenager. I had acne that lasted into my 30s, so I had a somewhat tortured relationship with my looks, but coming from an artistic setting, I knew from experience that looks weren’t everything. I was funny, creative and smart. I was a ski instructor for a while, but I also had the over-riding acne that kind of tainted everything. Most teens and young women have issues with their looks. I can’t recall my line of thinking that compelled me to set up a mirror and paint my face, except to say that in those hours, I wasn’t looking at problems, I was doing something else. Calculating relationships between features, studying shadow and contour, mixing color. I wasn’t sitting there thinking about how acne might limit my adventures in romance or whatever.
I started drinking at 13 and had various male friends and boyfriends, but even at the time, those years seemed superficial and unnecessarily angsty. I was happiest alone in my room listening to Led Zeppelin and CCR, sewing or painting. And reading. I was always reading novels. Adult fiction — James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Salinger, and “Daddy Was a Number Runner” by Louise Meriwether. It depicts a poor black family in Harlem during the Great Depression. I wasn’t aware of such a thing as young adult fiction at that time.
Anyway, I painted self-portraits in a way that was not part of historical feminine beauty or glossy advertising. I’d been exposed to lots of painters and I took to the fauves, the expressionists and the impressionists early on, but we also had subscriptions to Communication Arts that featured the best adverting imagery. Most of this stimulation was processed with acceptance. We had a book of photos of Picasso being a bit of an ass in his studio. That was kind of disturbing. I hoped my father wasn’t taking cues from him.
Over the years, I veered off into still-life and landscape painting, while intending to do one self-portrait a year. In 2000, I was invited to show the self-portraits at the original Ladyfest in Olympia, after which a group of laser prints of the paintings went on to two other Ladyfests. Around that time, David and I were exhibiting our art at Mecca Normal shows. I quit drinking that year and I found having extra things to do at a club was very helpful. Rather than sitting around drinking beer between sound check and the show, we put up an entire art show — and took it down again at the end of the night. This wasn’t something I figured out; it happened without me consciously thinking it up. It happened when I put my solo performance together too. Also in 2000, godspeed you black emperor! asked me to open their west coast shows after they heard my solo album. I played everything on the album (sax, drum, guitar, piano) so I made a backing CD and switched between guitar and sax on stage. There was no room for alcohol in this orchestration. This was during a long period of time in which I was working through a bunch of personal stuff. I’d always known that if I quit drinking I’d have to figure out why I was drinking in order to stay sober. So I was working on all that. Childhood, family, relationships. I was writing a lot about all this, but I was also painting. I did a series called “Pint Glass” on cream velvet fabric. Very loose and watercolor-y. The pint glass had been stolen at an airport and given to me on tour, but in the series of paintings it was being used as a vase. There was an incident at an exhibit I curated here in Vancouver when a well-known political artist came to see how her work had been hung for the show and she was very angry that her work was beside my supposedly meaningless paintings of flowers. To be fair, she didn’t know they were my paintings, but it was educational. Her work was extremely literal. I think it had actual text worked into it saying what it was about. To me, my work was political because it was a re-purposing of a beer drinking vessel, but all that was lost on her.
When the current $100 series began I was in the throes of finding a suitable part time job that allowed me enough time to write. I’m usually working on a novel and I’m very disciplined about getting up super early and writing, but part time jobs I’d been taking weren’t a good fit. I worked at Whole Foods as a cashier for a couple of months at Christmas and managed to bugger up my wrists which is not good when typing is your thing, so I left there and got in at a Home Depot garden center which was more or less OK until they started scheduling me for 5 days a week at 5:00 a.m. to water thousands of plants with a watering can. I told them I couldn’t work those hours. They nodded and smiled, and scheduled me the same way. The 20 hours I needed to pay my bills was over 5 days, greatly reducing my morning writing time because it was almost an hour’s walk to the Home Depot.
I’d started the painting series by casually posting on Facebook that I’d do one $100 painting a day to make a living rather than do the Home Depot job. I was thinking landscapes because that’s what I’ve done a lot of, but I posted a painting I’d done of David’s wife Wendy that I was going to give him for Christmas, but it didn’t look enough like her, so I hung onto it. Well, it sold within a matter of minutes and someone else wanted to give me money up front for the next one! So, that’s how it began. I had no idea that paintings of faces that weren’t really specific people would sell. It was a total revelation and from there I was amazed at how many people liked my really loose and abstract work. I figured I’d have to aim for realism, but it was really exciting to see comments from people I had no idea were interested in art suddenly going wild for less figurative work.
How have Facebook and other social media helped you become an independent painter?
Being a singer who has toured quite a lot — mostly in the 90s — I know how much audience reaction can elevate performances. I thrive in that situation. Being a novelist is extremely solitary work, but I like that sort of voluntary exile as well. I frequently posted excerpts of what I was writing, and even a small amount of interaction seemed to benefit the writing. It’s a form of accountability that I work with. Unlike posting music or writing, posting paintings gets an immediate reaction. As soon as I realized people really liked my work — and they’d buy it — I began establishing patterns for how and when I posted. I decided on the size and price and I create other content: videos, informative posts on my painting blog, studio visits, mobile exhibitions. All of this replicates how I promote albums, tours and books.
I’ve only really sent out one press release and that resulted in a nearly overwhelming response. I’ve been a long time follower of The Jealous Curator and I know she likes very stylized work. I wasn’t at all sure she’d like my paintings. I sent her the email and got an auto-response back saying she got 50 promo letters a day. Then, almost immediately, she wrote saying, “GAH! I love them, Jean! Post going up tomorrow!”
The next month was bonkers. I basically just sat here selling paintings, updating my online albums, taking photos out of the currently available files, and then there was the packaging and shipping. I think I sold about 45 paintings in the month following the feature. One thing I did that was sort of sneaky, was when she posted the feature on her Facebook page and hundreds of people “Liked” it, I went through and friend-requested every one of those people and most of them accepted, and I’m still getting sales two months later.
Before the feature I was selling half of what I painted — which kind of bugged me. Since the feature I’m selling three fifths. In a way, I have to be somewhat careful about doing too much promotion. I need time to paint!
Has your interaction with people through social media influenced your work?
As a singer in a band that has so far spent over 30 years creating music that doesn’t intend to be popular, I’d say I have a good handle on not caving in to the sentiments people express, and people rarely do, because these are people I’m connected to, it isn’t the general public, although I encourage anyone to add me on Facebook to see paintings as they’re created. I’d say most of my FB friends know who I am in terms of culture and some of the new ones regard me as a painter and they see I’m integrating my art practice and exhibiting by posting new paintings almost everyday. I paint, photograph and post. I do think a lot about viewers and what they say. The enthusiasm is very motivating, but I usually don’t react by repeating images. At one point last year I painted a baboon screaming, and people loved it! It got a high number of likes and it felt like a sensation. What I didn’t do was go and paint another baboon. I painted precisely zero more baboons. To me, that’s a political act. It’s downright anti-capitalist.
When a really special painting happens — and they do, fairly regularly — I want to allow it to be a special thing and I’m careful not to muck up the continuity of work or start thinking I should move beyond Facebook. I know people might be waiting for another baboon, but they don’t comment. I feel like I have a relationship with viewers. They encourage me and I feel seen and appreciated. We’re in close proximity and there’s a kind of reciprocity that we’ve built. The deal is that I keep making good paintings available for $100 and they keep telling me they like them — and they buy them regularly enough that I can make a living. It’s this strangely transparent process that’s part of the project. The unspoken part of the project is that the paintings may not be a bad investment.
It’s interesting too that the way I’ve structured the business side of painting is very much like what we did with Mecca Normal’s first record in 1986. We didn’t go looking for a record label because we wanted to do that part of it ourselves. Weirdly, Vancouver (which is on unceded Coast Salish territory) had a record pressing plant. When we went in to watch them do the initial set-up we were given the option of adding what was called inner groove writing. We had them write in “we live on Indian land” on one side and placed an order for 500 LPs which we somehow crammed in my 1973 Toyota Corolla when they were ready. It was all a total thrill and the beginning of long friendships and social change, and I wouldn’t trade it for a traditional career in the music industry.
Do you take commissions?
People ask me to do commissions and, in theory, I’d like to, but I really don’t enjoy doing them — especially if I’ve never laid eyes on the person in real life. I’ve had some success at painting likenesses, but it isn’t what I want to do, yet I have learned more about what I want to do from those occasions. When I’m painting a specific person I get bogged down in thinking about their chin or how they feel about their upper lip or whatever it is. I want to please them, but I also want to do a good painting. The best commissions have been the ones when people have said it doesn’t matter if it looks like them! Otherwise, it’s all quite taxing because I’ll be getting good results, but then I’ll have to change it to make it look more like someone and that’s just not what I want to be doing. Also, I don’t want to be charging some other price — or I get people assuming I do likenesses for $100, which, when you think about it, is a lot more work. So being accessible on the internet opens me up to a plethora of notions that could derail me, but my background and experience helps me stay focused. Having had more success than I ever imagined as a singer who sings however I want is a good template to build a painting empire from.
Do you still find time to write? If so, what are you working on these days?
I’m working on a YA novel about a group of teens who start a band and tour to Chicago to record with a famous producer, but I have to admit that since The Jealous Curator feature, painting sales have increased and I haven’t been writing for the past couple of months, which is really weird for me. My literary agent is keen to get it, so I need to figure out where I left the story. Originally, selling paintings was supposed to give me time to write without having to go to a job, but painting took over.
I also write and curate a weekly column for Magnet Magazine online that includes an illustration by David Lester, a free song download, and what started out as a caption written by me, but has taken off into other areas like lyrics, short stories and band history. We’re currently at Volume 454 with no intention of stopping.
What’s going on musically?
Mecca Normal is writing new songs to record as an album. We wanted to have a few new songs when we opened for The Julie Ruin in 2016 — you know, just to make that as uncomfortable an experience as possible (joking). So they were written with those shows in mind. There’s one about feminism called “I Am Here” that people reacted well to. Plus, we still have “Anguish/Misogyny” that we wrote when we last toured in 2014. I’m moving away from the very dense lyrics that I’ve taken directly out of novels that I’d hoped would have been published around the same time as the albums. Those are like singing short stories, which I really liked, but now I want to be freer and replace the words with energy. We also have a live album from 1996 coming out in 2018 as part of a series related to an iconic radio program called Brave New Waves that aired coast to coast on CBC, Canada’s national network. Weirdly, I feel like we’re still contenders. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be taken seriously. I feel better about almost everything than at any other point in my life. I’m super happy to be working on Mecca Normal with David, but it’s weird that now, because we’re both working on other things, everything takes longer to finish, but those other projects — like my novels and painting and David’s current project: a graphic novel about Emma Goldman — are also part of our group projects and in that we expand our focus, work independently and then we bring these experiences back to song writing.
Do you find that on social media people respond differently to your paintings, writing and music? Or do they all work together?
By the time David published my first novel in 1993, Mecca Normal had played hundreds of shows. It was a strange revelation when, after performing, we’d fling open the merch case and people gravitated to the book. Where before we’d only seen people standing around looking at our records and t-shirts, now there were people standing around looking at books, too. I sometimes go back to that image in my mind as a reminder that we don’t really know what will fly.
Initially, I used social media (primarily MySpace) as a blog for my writing. I posted excerpts from novels and wrote about whatever projects David and I were undertaking — tours, books, albums. Mostly I developed a relationship between that voice and a small audience. I kept hearing about the migration to Facebook, but I didn’t like the nature of the newsfeed. Its sense of flowing into the past didn’t seem to work for blog-style writing rooted in an url, but that’s how I used it. As a blog. I wrote about what was going on at various part time jobs and with my elderly parents and people connected with those universal themes. But I could also feel other people thinking: “Get a blog, lady!” But that’s social media. It’s mostly about inventing and assuming what we think other people are thinking, which is something I spent a lot of time working on about 15 years ago — not assuming and not taking things personally.
Facebook is great for people like David and I who toured quite a lot and made friends in other places over the years. It’s something of a miracle that they are accessible in this way. They make up a certain percentage of my ‘friends’ but I’d say most of my ‘friends’ are people who know me, but I don’t know them. I was a regular content provider long before I started the $100 painting project, but now people are seeking me out because they’re hearing about it in places I can’t reach either because I’m algorithmically limited or they’ve seen my paintings featured elsewhere. I’ve figured out a bit of coding, but I have my doubts I’m able to connect through any SEO cleverness. I have been testing out long-tail keywords lately, using “contemporary portrait paintings” in my WordPress posts, but I haven’t been able to deduce its impact. Nor do I have any clue what’s ahead. For almost the entire 22 months, I’ve been fearfully anticipating that the whole thing will grind to a halt and I’ll be back to looking for another part time retail job, which, at 58 with rock ‘n roll sized gaps in my resume, may be difficult to secure.
Every now and then I feel like there are a whole bunch of people waiting for one of the “really good ones” which kind of bugs me. Sometimes when the bar gets set too high, there’s a lull in sales while people wait. I monitor all of these occurrences and think a lot about how to proceed. I recently got a comment from a woman who seemed to be complaining that selling paintings was effortless for me. Believe me, it’s a roller coaster ride. Being self-employed as an artist and starting a small business aren’t easy. Then I get people making suggestions about things I could do with the paintings — pillows, postcards, shows — but the thing is, what I’m doing is working. I’m not going to take time away from something that’s working to go into the postcard business. As a one person operation, I am very careful with my time and I protect my creativity.
Seeing as how you’re an artist whose work has from the first fearlessly expressed the rage of women, what’s your take on #MeToo?
It made me realize that my singing and talking about sexual harassment and sexual assault for 30 years is a very unusual role to have created. I think it’s safe to say that most women haven’t participated in the same way I have, as part of a public reckoning that intends to create a sense of scope of misogyny. I can’t imagine many women are surprised at its pervasive reach into our lives. For me personally, it feels like a weird milestone. I’ve been an activist in this way for so long that it seems sort of sad that we’re only at this stage of evolution. It doesn’t seem like too much has improved in this regard and yet, all that can be mustered is a #MeToo on Facebook or Twitter. I don’t know. I guess that reflects my frustration at not having seen more progress. I posted a little story and a video of the song “Orange Sunset” as my #MeToo, as an example of what I’ve been singing about since the early 80s. Maybe my history will be useful in a way that I can’t yet see.
You’ve said the $100 price of your paintings, despite advice from experts that you should charge much more, is important to you because it makes your art accessible to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it. Do you sometimes contemplate a more expensive series?
There are quite a few factors to consider — not all of them are altruistic, but I do like it that the price gives first-time art buyers and regular job-holders a chance to buy original paintings. The price would be part of an artist statement, but I want to sidestep art world constructs and deal directly with people. I blurted out the figure — $100 USD — in a rash statement when I was working in retail. “I’d rather do a painting every day and post it for sale for $100.” So, that became the project. There was immediate interest and sales. I have done a few larger paintings — one is in a gallery of art by musicians along with Bob Dylan, Bowie, Grace Slick, Jimi Hendrix and bunch of others. My prices for the larger work isn’t in step with the $100 series, but they aren’t gallery prices either. For now, sales on Facebook are strong enough. I can pay my bills. I’m making a living as a single artist without any other income. That’s a total thrill!
As a fortunate Canadian but also as someone who has fearlessly spoken out about politics and injustice in America what’s your take on how Trump happened and what comes next?
One of the more radical statements I’ve read recently is that the world’s wealthy are waging war on the poor. I tend to look to Noam Chomsky for big picture, bold analysis. The film “Requiem for the American Dream” is very good for that. In fact not just big picture, but returning to the basic foundation of society, such as: concentration of wealth yields concentration of power. I suppose what comes next ideally is a public re-assessment and letting go of highly-regarded institutionalized tenets that intend to protect the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Widespread concern should follow the understanding that the fundamental task of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority” as James Madison (one of the framers of the Constitution) stated.
As a feminist and cultural activist, how did you decide to paint women’s faces?
To some degree, I want my history as a feminist who has created very direct political work for 30 years, to be a trusted component in this project. When I’m painting a face, I feel like I’m representing a unique, yet non-specific individual based on the photo I’m using as a subject. I have a sense of there being too much power on my side. I don’t want to betray the individual that I’m creating by making them too sexy or too sad or too predictable. I want to give them the opportunity to not smile, to not ‘say cheese’ at the camera. I’m very aware that I’m painting from photos that were taken for specific purposes — a lot of them are publicity shots or for advertising. It feels like I’m giving misrepresented personalities the opportunity to express a depth of emotion — which is sometimes anger — or maybe it’s the subtle nuances I choose to include; that they are being painted specifically by me. I’m using the strength of my history as a feminist to allow these faces to take back their image and have it made accessible again through me and I take that responsibility seriously. It’s an exercise in trust. Even where there is no accountability to that person. I’m not the male photographer or art director trying to get the shot the client will use to sell merchandise. I come along later and perform a sort of imbuing of emotion that might have been there, but wouldn’t serve the purpose of a photo shoot.
Painting these faces is informed by the years I’ve spent writing novels. When I say I’m self-taught as a writer I don’t mean I went out and found material to learn from, I mean that I started and sorted out methods on my own. Building characters that function consistently to represent a concept in the story is a very grand and tricky undertaking. This sense of responsibility carries over into the paintings I’m doing now. Sometimes I read people saying that I create these faces with just a few strokes of the brush and — voilà! But that isn’t how it happens at all. There are thousands of micro-nuances that occur around the eyes and the mouths especially, that I keep painting over, adjusting to fit with an overall feeling — my feeling and the feeling on the subject’s face. If there’s one great skill in painting, it’s knowing when to stop. I’m pretty good about stopping, but until it’s all there, I keep painting.
I think my years working at Curves was very helpful to this project as well. I was a fitness technician at Curves — a weight loss gym for older women — but one of my main functions was to go around the circuit with women and basically listen to them or tell them stories. It was extremely social and physical — and there were no men around. Being with women in this environment over maybe five years was fascinating. Being part of a community that encourages an openness about appearance and physical activity was very positive. I spent thousands of hours standing across from women, talking with them as they worked out, while they were not, in those moments, trying to configure themselves to be glamorous, beautiful, or otherwise counter to how they felt
How does your interest in politics influence your painting?
I often feel like I should be doing more overtly political art like my “Standing Rock Water Protectors” series, that painting faces — women’s faces — isn’t enough. Yet, this concern reflects how a lot of people feel right now, historically. What can I do? What can any of us do to set things on a better course? Maybe it hasn’t been necessary to describe the better course for a long time. Better than what? Better than 1% self-interest. How about the greatest good to the greatest number of people? A utilitarian premise that doesn’t take us too far, but I think that’s what people have in mind as opposed to being fine with the wealthy doing whatever they want to make money at the expense of everyone else.
When I start to question my motivation for not making overtly political art, I accept that fear is involved. Would people buy political art? Do I paint protestors or faces? I go back to the amount of very direct political content I have created. Must I always sing political songs? Paint political art? Write political novels?
I did two paintings that depict a woman being carried away at a demo. I admit: when the second one didn’t sell, I stopped. If it had sold, I would have painted more of them. I make a distinction between making multiple paintings of political subjects and replicating primarily aesthetic work. It’s very different. If I had a strong sense of political work selling, I’d paint more of it. Painting faces is a way for me to support myself and protect myself from retail-related damage (wrists, back, etc.) so that I can continue to make more overtly political work in the future. There! I’ve justified it! Yet, if painting women from photos whose primary intention was to exploit women in the name of capitalism, if painting those faces with a completely different intention, to populate the world with women’s emotions that they themselves (allegedly) felt — anger included — this is political. It’s also utterly idiosyncratic and it requires some thought. It’s also the work of a cultural activist who has been creating work across a handful of disciplines without ever making it big, but yet, keeps going rather than giving up or selling out.
I sometimes feel that the prettier faces sell fastest, that there’s a demand for youth and beauty, that I don’t want to play into. I’m not searching for something that will sell well and then continue to paint a bunch of those. That isn’t what I’m doing. Even though I get immediate feedback in terms of ‘likes’ and sales on Facebook, I return to paint whatever I want. Most recently, I’ve been placing more importance on areas other than the face like the hair, neck and shoulders — where I’m doing more abstract work. It’s a way of broadening the work beyond the face.
I think more money-driven artists might go towards what sells, but that’s too much like capitalism — as is raising the price for no particular reason other than it’s the conventional thing to do when something becomes popular. All the years of making music that isn’t about fame and fortune fortifies this approach. I know first hand what else can be accomplished by making something that isn’t essentially profit-driven. Friendship, community, measurable social change. Don’t get me wrong — I want to have money to reduce worry and increase security, but it isn’t what propels this project. Yet again, if the paintings weren’t selling, I’d have to get a job in retail. Grappling with the balance between creativity and commerce is nothing new to me. It’s part of what I’d include in an artist statement, but I think that’s something that will come later.
I view the posting of paintings on Facebook as sequential art. I’m not sure if anyone else sees it that way. When I use the same subject, but change the features from blonde to brunette etc., there is usually a stylistic connection between those paintings. It can be a bit tricky to move on to a new subject. Tricky in how that transition appears on Facebook. After perhaps a week or more of a strong style, I want a sense of connection to the first new painting. It’s a bit like selecting where songs are positioned within an album. Maybe the average listener isn’t thinking about that, but it’s a step in making an album. I recently reached this point after painting from the same photo and someone (a former culture writer from Bitch Magazine) commented, asking me to outline each stage of my artistic choices in the new painting. To me, this is fantastically stimulating! To have the opportunity to engage with an interested viewer, one who has been watching the procession of paintings posted for months, want to know something specific. I feel like I’m in a similar environment to Paris around 1907, in the Montmartre studios of Picasso, Chagall, Matisse, when the poets came around and gave voice to the paintings and the painters. All men, we notice — except for the models.
I’m extremely comfortable living online. It isn’t a matter of simply posting paintings; it’s creating a world in which the paintings fit historically and within the immediacy of connections that the internet provides.
LINKS
Jean Smith 