mcauleyhouseartists: Transforming Cardboard

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Transforming Cardboard

Andre Villers

Andre Villers was an artist that taught himself everything he treasured most in life: photography, painting, a passion for poetry. He also taught himself how to walk again after spending five claustrophobic years in plaster casts when many doctors dismissed him as a hopeless invalid. He had earlier been stricken with a spinal deformity caused by wartime childhood malnutrition during enemy occupation of his hometown in eastern France.

A master photographer, his portraits of painters and poets have been published around the world. It was while Villers was developing his photographs that he began painting on cardboard which was stacked in piles on the side of his studio. Once he started creating this collection of colorful figures he couldn't stop. Hundreds of his creations covered his property.

Working with only a razor-knife and discarded boxes brought home by his wife from the nearby supermarket, an office stapling machine and his seemingly never exhausted imagination, Villers created the entire population of a mythical race- a children's world of giants and gnomes for everyone!

I love showing pictures of Andre Viller's work to students as well sharing his story. He's one of those artists so many people can relate to- his journey as an artist as well as his triumph over severe limitations is easy for students to identify with in one way or another.

Our class not only embraced the spirit of Villers but their own creative spirit as well.

About the Art Program

5 Ways to Grow as an Artist

So how would a Cassatt or a Henri or Picasso approach painting differently than we do today? How might this heartfelt fear of others controlling our painting process impact our self-understanding as artists? Here are five possible answers:

1. Making a successful picture is not the goal. Think of periods, such as childhood, when we grew, our self-understanding changed and we became more of who we are. There was an endless stream of events where we expressed ourselves and slowly began to discover the things that pleased us. As with the sense of freedom characterized above, the entire payoff was growth. The events of life when we grow are the things that happen along the way. Making art should be exactly the same. Paintings are just the series of events or steps we take. Let them go. Keep moving. Or as Henri implored, “Keep living.”

2. The painting process is always a beginning. As soon as the freshness evaporates (we are bored or lost or acquire interest in something else), stop. Do not think in terms of finishing. Picasso lectures eloquently on this. Finish is the death of our work because it means we are painting an expectation or “to be like” and that puts the brakes on painting to see and feel more deeply. Every beginning is a new prompt, a new point of departure. Begin everything. Finish nothing.

3. Ignore non-artist authorities. Juries, the grantors, the gallery, the direction from above are just so many fingers in our pie. All external measures are dangerous because they not only push us to performing, as opposed to creating, but their sense of worth takes over our own. This is precisely what Parisian artists fought against.

4. Get into a prolonged creative process. Have dozens of paintings in your studio that have been abandoned for one reason or another, left in various stages, unfinished but always complete as expressions of who you were at that moment. Work on several paintings simultaneously. You are not making shoes.

5. Furnish the world with your beauty, let the world see, touch and feel who you are. Scary I know. It is so much easier to hide within safe fortresses, the sources of praise and dignity that we can count on by pleasing our audience. This is the dreaded condition called style. We cannot be free to be who we are if we are not always risking being who we are in front of others.