PULP PASSIONS

an interview with Sarah Berney by Peter Barton

Sarah Berney lives in a clean, well lighted hermitage on Warren Street in Hudson, NY, once the studio of George McKinstry, turn of the century Hudson River School artist. She also maintains a pocket-sized room on the Lower East side of Manhattan in order to make paper paintings at Dieu Donne paperworks in SoHo. Determined to follow a vision that leads away from the humanist realms of figuration and representational traditions, she has placed her foot squarely on the metaphysical plane of expressive and sensual abstraction in order to explore feelings more wedded to the present tense of contemporary art and experiences more intrinsic to her own life. The artist is interviewed in the stark, sunbeamed twilight hours of her studio and is found to possess a surprising depth of devotion to her art form, unexpected because of the bright and easy persona by which people and friends know her best.

PETER BARTON: There is the social impress of new mediums invading art consciousness - computer imaging, digital art, video art and all the rest of it - still you seem content to work with wet and messy handmade paper - slurry, sloppy, tactile stuff. Don't you feel any pressure to change your work or medium?

SARAH BERNEY: In my earlier work, when I was doing figurative work, I felt it lacked a sophistication and the way I resolved that was to go into abstraction. That's the response which is important to the question. As far as paper is concerned, obviously I'm a fan of paper and I don't think there is anything it can't do. It think it translates the artist's work no matter what the content or intention is. So if I were a computer artist or wanted to work in more technical forms the paper could go along with it. The paper isn't holding me back from making changes, I've been into this medium for twenty years and worked across many styles and techniques and they always translate seamlessly. Paper itself has modern elements, the materials and ways of making it have undergone innovations which are available and provide that sense of contemporary process if you want to use it to push boundaries. Synthetic fibers and binders, for example. The only pressure I might feel - and I can't say I'd even call it that it's more of a responsibility - is pushing the boundaries while keeping the traditional affects or esthetic experiences in tact. This way of working is integral to why I use the medium and I don't want to lose it or push it away just for ideas or the pressure to conform. When you are creating, or in the creative process, you adhere to the sensations which guide you because art making is such difficult work.

PB: I don't want to gloss over your initial comment that you solved your psychological perplexity with figuration by working in abstraction. This is an enormous leap that many artists simply can't perform. How did you source this new inspiration?

SB: My mind made the leap; and therefore my art had to make the leap. I was feeling a ball and chain with the figurative work, the me-me, the I-I of it was tedious, it was so close to reality and the artist's interpretation or representation of the visual, the seen world. I've painted all my life, every moment of my life you might say, but through childhood I always painted out of my dark side. And when you work so close to your own self, you are what you eat, you are your art. So it was a self-fulfilling negativity. I started to read New Age books and delve into these experiences and I realized that I have a bright side, and why not work out of the light and not from angst.

PB: Traditionally these spiritual transitions take considerable time and effort...

SB: Four days, believe it or not! After only four days, all this stuff started to come out, beacons of light, power sources, very positive and affirming energies that had been dammed up. I wanted to see these energies, let them materialize and make me happier, make my life better. It was all there for me first and the art followed along reflecting what was already very vivid, already existing inside my mind.

PB: Spiritual emotion and esthetic emotion share the same ground. Did you feel that immersing yourself in the wet, colorful, romantic paper-making process provided you with a more spiritual way of life? I mean, did making art become a spiritual as well as an esthetic realm of sensations?

SB: Whatever I'm thinking comes out in my art work. At times I am more spiritual than at other times. It's funny. Very often your art work is intellectually ahead of where you yourself are. Your subconscious is way ahead of you. You feel deep down sensations, have glimpses, stirrings along the way of things that are reoccurring. In terms of the paper and being physical, I like to turn things on, fiddle and play around, do things with my hands, and paper is about the most wonderful physical experience of making stuff you can have. You can just hang in a bucket of cotton and linen slurry and feel satisfied, charged, so completely present in yourself. You can become addicted to the tactile part of it, and any artist working this way will tell you that, it's a shared even if not an outspoken awareness. In that sense you feel guided by your senses which react to what's coming from inside your head.

PB: Your art exudes sensuality. You don't paint or color on paper, the color is actually impregnated into the coarse texture and fiber of the paper. How does this limit your gestural spontaneity?

SB: When you do a big series there's days and days of preparation, making your pulp, making your pallet, arranging your work area... But once you have your colors set it starts to flow, to sing. Right from the beginning of your base shape, which you form with a screen and a mold - it's called a mold and deckle - and that dictates the size and thickness of your sheet. So you, from the beginning, try to get some swirling, some atmosphere going in the base shape. I do my rendering in pigmented linen in squeeze bottles. Linen is very smooth and silky, fluid. Color saturates it more than it does cotton which is also clumsier, more cloggy. I render with the squeeze bottles right into the cotton slurry, and it is fully expressive, gestural and immediate in every sense, from mental impulse to sensual gesture, wet and thrilling in many ways - until you press it! When you press the work and it starts to dry, that's when you give up the control. You really don't know the final outcome. Some of those surprises are wonderful and some of them are not so wonderful. Once the water is forced out, the image is totally integrated into that base shape. You can keep working a piece as long as it's wet, but when it's dried out, it's over - for me. Other artists begin working on dry paper, but you see how it goes in my work. The final emotion of holding the dry image is the end of the piece for me and that last sensation is out of my hands.

PB: Paradoxically, this wet effect in the process exerts a rigid control over your content doesn't it? You can't do intricate or figurative images....

SB: I beg to differ! Because I was a figurative painter for twenty-five, and I thought of paper as an adjunct to my painting, I forced the paper process to be as realistic as possible. Here, look at this catalogue. See how intricate the rendering is while the process gives a loose interpretation to the image? You can write in it, do figures or other images, whatever. You have a lot of control especially if you use templates. It's adaptive.

PB: You did a lot of body work. There is a degree of sexual imagery and energy, fleshy nudes, and so on. This pink rose is more than a rose obviously.

SB: My figurative work was very sexual - woman as sexual object, objects as fleshy and feminine, not obsessively so but not just idealistically either. For the past several years I have been living like a monk practically, as you can see - no phone, a simple studio and my dog Belle De Jour. But it wasn't always this way, I was very much a party animal, a guy junkie, relating men to myself and worrying about how this compromised the seriousness of my work and that struggle is in there, very obvious in its own way.

PB: At the time was this political commentary, ending the fear of flying, feminism?

SB: It was what it was! You are what you eat.

PB: So these figures are all female, are they all you, you were painting yourself?

SB: I always loved figure work and these came out of that, from formal figure study. I used my own body because it was there, it was easy to relate to from internal experience. I used models as well, a lot of models because working from yourself gets old fast, boring in a way, but when you want to paint you just paint and my body was available. Now all my art is metaphysical, even scientific, geomtric and the imagery is metaphorical, the shapes are symbolic, even, of larger implications, again ending the me-me fixation and looking into universal meanings... I was a colorist in a paper mill for many years, so color became the essential form for sensuality, the flow of colors, how colors move with other colors, the range of experiences when laying them down, and how they effect you emotionally through the eyes... This was probably the pivotal crossover for me, where there was transition to pure abstract yet sensual sensations. I was such a symbolist in my representational painting and wondered at times what I was going to do about this in the abstract work. But then color itself became emotional symbolism, and when it is contained in geometric form it resonates powerfully as an emotional state. Red stands for female, blue stands for male - not intentionally, but that's just how it is. So when I do something red, I have to do something blue, there is this need for duality, balance, which I deal with a lot.

PB: Are you all to the bright side then, or do you lapse back?

SB: Funny you should say that! This is the most interesting thing because too much of a good thing can go bad. [Laughing] After six years of consciously keeping the dark out, I realized this is only one half of the story. I was doing a lot of rectangles, which is how I work, I do a lot of a thing and choose the ones that work best. But after maybe forty of these bright-side rectangles, darker forms came out and I saw it so clearly, that these have to be part of the work - in fact, they have to be in the work at the outset, the idea of light and dark. I will say I had been reading concepts of the Qabala - not the Qabala itself - and this idea of The Abyss rose up. I was in an abyss at the time, due to financial things and stress which are the most common source of darkness for me now, and it just popped out in the painting and changed the direction of everything... Art for me is a journey, a journey about letting go, even of the idea of only focusing only on the light. Once you let go, I mean really let go! of whatever you are holding onto, then life begins to unfold in the most mysterious ways, the little magical things begin to flow in. In that way, the older I get the more I commit to my art, and the spiritual flows in, not necessarily that easily, but naturally.

PB: You've done a lot of work on yourself, knitting behavior to ideal. Most people are to one side or the other. But you also seem so specific, so filled with your art and work. Does this make relationships more difficult? Do you sacrifice intimacy or sameness with other people owing to such a sophisticated abstraction?

SB: Wow! These questions... I always wanted to be one of these people who could be in the studio for days and not need anyone else. Well, I've achieved that! I feel I almost made a pact with the devil and got that. Relationships are secondary to me. I just want to run to the studio, lock the door, empty my mind and work. Right now I don't know how to go back. Whenever I get into a male relationship my work starts to get pretty, I start trying to please or defuse the intensity of my art and anything that intimidated or threatened the guy I was with at the time got thrown out the window. I can't do that anymore. I'm getting that full power and enjoyment out of my own work, and that has to point the way until...well, until it opens up another path someone who can take me as I am. Taking my art seriously is joyful, my work is my joy and that feeling can't be found in anyone else or sacrificed to anybody either. Art is just that, art - nothing more any certainly nothing less.

PB: You mentioned the Qabalistic Abyss and art as livelihood. What is your biggest fear right now, is it still financial stress?

SB: For the first time I'm really, really scared. It has just become very difficult and although I live in the bright center of my art vision with as little as possible to get by, the sky outside is always getting darker in that respect. Maybe it's this way for you, but art is an addiction, an obsession. I will sell anything I have, go to any extreme to keep this art going. It is all I have ever done all my life, is focus on the means to keep doing this work. But lately I wonder what will become of me if the magic doesn't begin to flow in that particular way. It seems to hide from brightness and I begin to wonder whether I will fall away into the dark again.

Sarah Berney's work has representation through the Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, New York and Pardo Lattuada Gallery in New York City's Chelsea District. See her work at http://www.pardolattuadagallery.com/. Peter Barton is an artist and journalist, and his work can also be seen at: http://www.pardolattuadagallery.com/