When does an Artist stop being?

By Claire Hogenkamp - October 13, 2009

When an artist stops exhibiting, is she no longer an artist? If nobody is looking does art cease to exist? That is like the Zen question “if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there, does it make a noise?"

My immediate response is what does it matter? In the case of the artist I might add who cares? Such is the state of Art in Canada that most artists go unrecognized and unnoticed. They just keep on working but don’t give up their day jobs.
The Art elites keep discovering new trends and making new declarations about the status of Art calculated to be radical, outrageous and “new”. Hence members of the public who are interested, are constantly rendered old fashioned and out of step. The public is generally excluded and if art becomes popular it is suspect. I believe this is a defense mechanism that has become a reflex against years of state and popular neglect of the Arts. It’s like saying “they’ll hate me anyway so I’ll show them I can really be hateful”.

This leaves the way clear for the cognoscenti (academics and critics) to toss out declarations like all painting is dead, the landscape is irrelevant, the Group of Seven is passé and thus turn away from Canadian greats like the late Goodridge Roberts (painter); Anne Kahane (sculptor); the late Robert Langstadt (printmaker) and they are not even included in the lexicon of Canadian Art anymore. Their work exists and is important, but if exhibited at all, critics don’t even bother to look at it.

If the art has been created on paper, board or canvass, with paint or pastels, carved or cast in traditional materials it’s not important enough for serious consideration. But if the art is created with meat, by feet, with hurled spit, or exploded shit, it is “compelling, edgy” and very “now”. I don’t object to Art being edgy or now providing we remember who we are and where we come from. We have a tradition in Canada and we neglect it at our peril. Students should know the Group of Seven opened our eyes to our own landscape; Emily Carr is our spiritual art mother; Goodridge Roberts painted with uncompromising honesty, Anne Kahane brings humanism to wood and aluminum with exquisite finesse and Robert Langstadt brought Expressionism to Canadian printmaking. They are important benchmarks for their métiers, and every art student can become better from seeing them.

As for the opening questions, I can say that I have been working away quietly these past forty some years creating landscapes, taking photographs, and recently returning to sculpture, without exhibiting and acknowledged only by close friends and family. Have I ceased being an artist? Possibly, but I continue to make art. It’s not the title that’s important, it’s the process.

I dropped off the Art Map in Canada very abruptly in 1970 when I was awarded the second of three Canada Council Grants. I moved to New York to study Film and TV production at Columbia University. I had been a sculptor and printmaker of national stature but was growing more interested in film making. It provided a means of earning a living that sculpture couldn’t. I needed to earn a living. Poverty does not make better art.

Living in a Manhattan apartment in the 70s didn’t provide a work space for sculpture so I had to let it go and concentrate on my documentary film career. I was hired in 1973, after graduation, by Lawrence Solomon Productions as his assistant editor where I learned the editing craft and the film business. I assisted on many films, was promoted to sound editor, editor and later production manager on projects ranging from WNET’s Children’s Television Workshop, to the Pele Pepsico project and a regular series of documentary films for CBS “Eye on New York”. I won film awards at several documentary film festivals for my own independent films as well as craft awards for company productions. I was, as the saying goes, “making it in New York”.
I married in 1976, had a baby in 1977, bought a house and launched my own post production company so I could work from home. I taught film production and animation at Adelphi University on Long Island from 1977 – 1981. From 1978 to 1982 I was filmmaker in residence with the New Jersey Arts Council, teaching a semester each year in New Jersey inner city high schools.

Every summer I came back to the family cottage in Quebec’s Laurentians to introduce my daughter to cottage life and country values. Each summer I painted landscapes for pleasure and so it continued for over forty years.

I moved to Toronto in 1983 and then to Peterborough in 1996 and worked in the communications area of the Ontario government. I designed media campaigns, promoted policy initiatives, and worked directly with First Nations on consultation and communication strategies. I won more awards for effective government communications but throughout, I kept on painting my private vision. My husband died some years ago and my daughter is embarked on a life of her own in London Ontario.

I’m retired now and still painting and taking pictures. I have been a champion of the Arts and an advocate for more Arts funding and recognition. There are all kinds of excellent, talented people here in Peterborough that are eking out tenuous livelihoods as artists or working in unrelated day jobs to support their art. If my volunteer work has helped in some small way to keep the creative fires burning, I’m happy. But now it’s my time. There are some sculptures I need to finish and more paintings to do. I will soon be seventy and time is not on my side. I feel the need to open up my quiet world to let people see my creative process. Perhaps an exhibition will shed some light on my Zen question. “If an old woman paints and sculpts in solitude all her life is she an artist?