Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
For the next two weeks in Inkwell, we'll be talking to Bix Archer, 
an artist and arts worker from San Francisco. Her work is largely
concerned with problems of memory and attention. She was a 2020-2021
recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation,
which has supported a new body of work investigating the
relationship between hippie counterculture and the early internet in
the Bay Area.  She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.  We'll be
talking about her recent exhibit, "Small Town at the Edge of
Cyberspace": 
<https://www.makeroom.la/viewing-room/17-bix-archer-small-town-at-the-edge-of-c
yberspace/>

"When the internet as we know it was first taking shape, the hippies
and hackers who logged on needed language to describe this new
entity they were navigating. It was a wilderness, a vehicle, a
bulletin board, a community, a cafe, a letter on the kitchen table.
It was their real world, the world of the Bay Area, but also not.
The Bay seeped into the space. And this internet spilled out from
behind the screen and worked its way back into the landscape and the
people."

Leading the conversation is Debbie Gross, a nomadic painter of jizos
and ravens. She is currently in Melbourne, Australia. She mostly
works in watercolors, but is starting to try out acrylics.

Welcome, Bix and Debbie!
  

    
hello! I’m very excited to be here. 
  

    
Hi Bix! Such a joy to get to talk to an artist. I was curious how
you chose to work with oils, and what your process is to start a
painting. 
  

    
I started working with oils in 2017 or so, and was really drawn to
both their luminosity and the different effects you can achieve by
mixing them with different mediums (I love that oils can be
everything from a very light wash to something incredibly viscous
and opaque). 

My process for painting usually starts with a loose idea for an
image -- sometimes it's something I've seen that I feel moved to
paint, or something I read something that inspires an image, or an
idea just comes to me. I usually work out the general composition in
my sketchbook, but then once I start painting it might go in a
totally different direction. Very rarely do I have an idea of what
the finished painting is going to look like when I first start.
  

    
Did you grow up in an environment that encouraged you to be an
artist?

As I look through your paintings it is interesting to me how often
tables and books appear. Do they hold a special connection to you?
Or they are prevalent in your life? I admire your ability to get
shapes and perspectives of tables and chairs to look right! It can
be so hard.
  

    
yes, definitely. My dad is a sculptor and many of my parents friends
are artists, so I spent a lot of time around art as a kid. 

Books are a huge part of my life! I’m always reading. Sometimes they
appear in a painting to reference a specific narrative or idea, or
sometimes as a marker of time and place (ie I was reading a specific
book at the time I made the painting, so it gets folded in to the
scene). I also like thinking about how books are sites where a
relationship takes place — both between the reader and the book, but
also the reader and other readers. I think an important part of my
relationships to others often comes from reading what they’ve read
and learning to share a common language with them. In that vein, I
sometimes think of the books in my paintings as a kind of portrait
of a relationship, or symbolic of a particular relationship. 

I’m going to think a little more about the table question!
  

    
Wow, books are really like that for me, at the beginning of the
pandemic, when I moved in w my parents for a bit, and was having a
hard time I read War and Peace w an online community over the space
of three months and I feel like it saved my life.

I could see how a book in a painting connects it to a certain time.

Did you always know that you wanted to paint in a
representational/figurative style, rather than say abstract art? I
thought it was interesting that the Elizabeth Greenshields
Foundation specifies a representational style.

Did you know people who were on the WELL in the early years? Or you
mostly encountered it through reading? Do you have an online
community of artists? Or an art community in other ways?
  

    
And who are some of your favorite artists?
  

    
Bix, thanks for sharing the insight into your work. I've struck by the use
of deep and bright color -- and also the books and tables as Debbie says.

Forgive me, for asking this question but as an old person, I have to:
although you've been doing art for along -- why are you so interested in
memory? what about that is compelling to you.

I'm also fascinated by your fascination with attention. What kind of
attention is part of your practice as an artist? And how do you look at the
work of other painters? And how do you recommend we look at your work?
  

    
I think I've felt drawn to a representational style -- it was not so
much a calculated decision to make work in that way, but one that
came about naturally. Many of my favorite artists work
representationally, although some moved between figurative and
abstract styles (I love the Bay Area figurative painters, especially
Richard Diebenkorn). Lately, I've been looking at a lot of Vuillard
and Bonnard paintings, and I love how both of them use really loose,
more abstracted mark-making that converge into a cohesive picture.  

I first encountered the WELL by reading about it (specifically in
Fred Turner's book "From Counterculture to Cyberculture"), but then
I found out that people I knew had been/were on it! In the fall of
2020 I had made a zine of invented posters, some of which referenced
the WELL, and Evy Pine got in touch with me about them, which is how
I found out she was on here :) I don't have much of an online artist
community these days, but in high school, I made a few artist/writer
friends through tumblr who I am still in touch with (and actually, I
met my current roommates through one of those friends, so I am still
seeing the fruit of those online friendships borne out in the
offline world). But I would also say that a lot of people I would
consider to be in my artist community now live in different places,
so the internet facilitates our ability to stay in community with
one another.
  

    
To the question of memory -- I think I first became really
interested in thinking about memory in my paintings in 2018, when my
grandmother passed away. She was in California, and I was in New
Haven CT, and one of the ways I navigated my grief was to make a
series of paintings of her home, all from memory (you can see some
of these on my website, if you scroll down the archive
https://bixarcher.com/ ). That was a really interesting exercise for
me, and started me thinking about how paintings might allow me to
access spaces or experiences that were otherwise only accessible in
memory. It also started me thinking about how paintings can collapse
or expand time, or layer together different moments or memories --
when making this body of recent work, it was really interesting for
me to read about other people's memories and experiences of spaces
in San Francisco/the Bay that I had my own, distinct memories of,
and to try and hold those things together in a painting
  

    
Can you talk more about painting collapsing and expanding time or layering
together different moments or memories?

That is such a compelling idea to me -- and hope some Welltrons who join
this discussion will talk about their early memories of the WELL and early
online communities in general and how they now experience those memories.

Also, Bix, what's your physical experience of making paintings -- the place,
how you do it physically, the time.  I can't help but be interested in how
that relates to the lush images you create.
  

    
yes! I think my thoughts on time in a painting are also related to
my thoughts on attention. On one level, I'm interested in the
attention required to render an object in a way that feels "true"
(not necessarily rendering it photo-realistically, but in a way that
captures the feel of it); often, this requires spending a lot of
time with that object and devoting attention to it in a way that I
haven't before. And then attending to the object can also mean
thinking through the histories it belongs to, the relationships it
has to other objects or to different people, and the different
meanings it gains through these things. To give some examples -- in
college, two objects appeared in a number of my paintings. One was a
mesh bag of shallots that I had forgotten about on top of my fridge,
which had then sprouted -- so I was thinking about the act of
painting as a way of returning attention to something I had
neglected. Another was a pair of heeled sandals that had belonged to
my grandma, and that she had given to me; I was interested in
examining how they contained a personal significance to me, but how
they were "read" in the painting would change depending on the other
objects they were in constellation with. On top of this, I was/am
also interested in how/if practicing attention like this might bring
about some kind of change within myself or my relationship to the
world, and how I might look at the world differently moving forward
(this in part influenced by my reading of the philosopher Simone
Weil, and her writing on attention as a kind of prayer).

I think practicing this kind of attention through painting is
related to the idea of collapsing and expanding time in the image --
paying attention to an object or space, through painting it, might
reveal the ways time is etched into it, and the different memories
it carries with it. A painting is different than something like a
photo, which is capturing a specific moment in time -- in painting
an image like this
https://bixarcher.com/media/pages/home/9507278a4d-1626300010/kitchen-table-web
.jpg , I spent time across many days looking at a vase of flowers, a dish with garlic, a paper bag, etc. in my parent's house in San Francisco, in addition to drawing up the background from my imagination. In that way, the painting was a record of time across a span of a number of days, in a specific location. But the composition of the scene was inspired by Elizabeth Reba Weise's description of finding community on the WELL as like finding "a letter on the kitchen table," which she wrote in an essay in 1996. So I was also thinking about the work as attempting to reach back to that time, and into her experience, in addition to existing in my own present -- making a San Francisco kitchen table scene that could exist between those times.
  

    
Hi, Bix. Thanks for making yourself being here.

I have a couple of questions, both loaded. :)

I’d like to start with one related to attention. In your last post
you seem to be speaking of a significant connection between you
(however that may be defined) and painting and you use the word
‘attention’. Do you think that attention ever veers into
self-awareness? Do you sense yourself when you are at work or do you
‘disappear’?

My second question is around your work habits. I like to read how
artists and writers work, things like their schedules, environments,
setups. Whatever you’d like to share.
  

    
This conversation is world-readable, i.e. can be read by anyone on
or off the WELL. Here's a short link for access:
https://bit.ly/bix-archer The full link is
https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/519/Bix-Archer-Small-Town-at-t
he-Edg-page01.html 

If you're reading this conversation, and you're not a member of the
WELL, you won't be able to post directly. However if you have a
comment or question, email it to inkwell at well.com, and we'll post
it here.

If you're not a member of the WELL, but you'd like to participate in
conversations like this, you can join the WELL:
<https://www.well.com/join/>  The WELL is an online conferencing
system and a virtual community with ongoing intelligent
conversations about many subjects - a great alternative to drive-by
posting on social media.

This conversation will last for at least two weeks, through April
18.
In order to read the whole conversation, we encourage you to return
regularly and use the more link and the pager.
  

    
I really like the sense of intimacy and comfort in your work, Bix. I
can imagine being at the table.
  

    
I remember reading that Ellen Ullman book -- so great.

I have another question which probably the artists reading and particpating
in the discussion know the answer to but I don't.  Do you make drafts of
paintings? I mean, as a writer I'm always working and reworking a text --
but how do you do that as a painter? Also, how do you decide to set up the
still life and how much does the painting -- in terms of composition I guess
-- vary from the set up.
  

    
To answer that question, and to go back to Miguel's question about
setup -- I usually make some drawings of what I'm going to paint
before I start, usually in my sketchbook but sometimes on larger
sheets of paper. But that's usually not a fully fleshed-out picture,
and once I start painting the image changes. I've been trying to
figure out a better system for working out "drafts" -- sometimes
I'll make a smaller "study" painting that I then translate into a
larger work, or making a drawing and taping it over the painting to
figure out a composition, and lately I'm experimenting with taking a
photo of the work and then drawing over that picture. What's
difficult is that once you put down a mark, it's very hard to fully
"erase" it, so there's always some risk in deciding that a part of
the painting needs to move, or change color, or something like that
(but this almost always happens for me -- in this painting,
https://bixarcher.com/media/pages/home/4038b7df53-1637453460/ba_17.jpg, the carpet color went from pink to light blue to dark red with a green border, and you can see some of the previous color iterations peeking through in different spots). When I'm making a still life, I usually have max one or two of the objects actually in front of me at once. Most of the time, I'm beginning with one object, and then deciding on another object to include (based off some kind of association/internal logic), and then seeking out that object in the world so I can get a better look at it, and continuing to build on the composition from there. Like with this work: https://bixarcher.com/media/pages/home/111bec529e-1648478387/elena-s-table.jpg
, I started with the plate in the top left (based on a picture from my friend), and then brought a Peroni bottle from home to put in the lower corner, and then included a candle based on drawings I had made at dinner on another night, and then brought in the book. I had to figure out how to change the lighting on the plate once I decided to include the candle, so I had to go back into that part of the painting to adjust it and accommodate the new parts of the still life.

When I'm able to paint changes depending on my work schedule
(yesterday, for example, I had work until 5 and was then in my
studio from 6-9pm, but today I was there from 12-3). In the hours
around that, I spend more of my time drawing and reading/researching
to gather information (I do a lot of my sketching in the evenings).
I try to spend the time in my studio itself focused just on painting
or on preparing materials (stretching canvas, gessoing, etc.) since
I can only do those activities in the studio and not at home. I try
to have an idea of what I'm going to work on when I go in, so if I'm
stuck at a certain point with my work, I'll use the time to prepare
a canvas. This year has been the first time I've had a studio that's
outside of my apartment, which has been great because I've been able
to work larger and on multiple paintings at once, but it's also
meant I feel the need to be more deliberate with my time, since I
have to build in the commute time to get over there.
  

    
There seems to be a problem with those links caused by the comma
that follows.  These should work.

https://bixarcher.com/media/pages/home/4038b7df53-1637453460/ba_17.jpg

https://bixarcher.com/media/pages/home/111bec529e-1648478387/elena-s-table.jpg

  

    
And since these are images, if you wish, you can do this (we can
explain how offline):


<img
src=https://bixarcher.com/media/pages/home/111bec529e-1648478387/elena-s-table.jpg
>
  

    
Thanks, Bix and Chris.
  

    
Thank you Chris!
  

    
Yes, big thanks.
  

    
When people are in your paintings do you get people to sit for you
and you paint them?

I was also curious how much time you spend trying to get paintings
into galleries or out in public, it seems like that could be a full
time job.
  

    
Sometimes I do, though more often I am looking at reference photos,
looking at myself in the mirror, or looking at works by other
artists (sometimes the people in my paintings are fully made up, and
sometimes they are based on someone I know). Though I would like to
have real people pose for me.

It's hard to say exactly how much time I spend trying to get
paintings out into the world — most of the time, they're reaching
the world through my instagram or my website, so the internet has
played a large role in what I've been able to get out there. But
another big part of it has been about building relationships with
other people and other artists who then help the paintings make
their way into the world, often in ways that I didn't see coming or
expect - the show with MakeRoom was a body of work that I was really
pursuing for its own sake, out of my interest in the early internet
in the Bay Area, and it ended up that through conversations with a
friend of mine, the gallery became aware of the work and asked about
showing it.

I'm curious, for WELL regulars, what the relationship between
friendships on the WELL and what you make (if you write, make art,
etc.) is like -- do you share work or collaborate through here, or
have you in the past? 
  

    
My favorite things to paint are Jizos (a bodhisattva, sorta like a
saint that helps people). I only learned about Jizo, because a
Japanese Buddhist priest (Ninsho) was visiting the zen center in San
Francisco and he was looking for a place to stay and he was good
friends w <gower>, who I met because he was looking for a place in
SF to stay while he tried out recipes for his new cookbook. Gower
ended up living w us for over a year, and we consider him a very
close friend, and I only met him because of the WELL. Now he has
founded Breakaway Matcha 
<https://breakawaymatcha.com/>

when we went to Japan a few years ago we stayed w Ninsho and visited
his temple. Ninsho taught me about Jizo.
<https://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/jizo1.shtml>

here is Ninsho:
<https://bejustbe.exblog.jp/1699477/>
I love him, even though we rarely see each other.

one small WELL story, other people here know Ninsho and <gower> as
well.