Renowned Artist: Grace DeGennaro

Today it's my great pleasure to be speaking to an artist I've long admired. Her name is Grace DeGennaro and I think there's going to be a lot of interesting things that you're all going to want to hear from Grace, but also I would highly encourage you to go look at her works on her website. So thanks for coming in today, Thank you for having me, So first of all, I have to tell you Grace is one of my favorite names. It's my daughter's middle name, and it kind of makes me wonder, is there sort of a family backstory on this as to how you ended up with this name? No, there is not. I think that my mother chose this name, chose the name because she really liked it. However, I will say that I grew up in a Catholic family, and so I think my name is Grace Mary So I understand this. My middle name is Marie, the first born daughters in our family. Were all middle names Marie. My mom's name is Mary. So the Catholic aspect of things is really interesting and it kind of weaves into a little bit what I understand of you and that there is this interesting depth and not necessarily Catholic, but depth and actually spirituality, almost a studied spirituality to the work that you do. But I don't want to put words in your mouth. Tell me about your background and your approach. I do think that some of the sense of spirituality that communicates to you and to others does come from my Catholic upbringing. I never set out to make spiritual paintings or religious paintings. It just sort of unfolded over the years. I did attend church on a very regular basis, and I mean every Sunday when I was a child in a very beautiful contemporary cathedral on Long Island where I grew up, and I loved the space, I loved how large the space was. I loved the stained glass windows. There was a beautiful choir and an organ, and actually as a very young child, maybe nine, 10 years old, would bike down to this church in the village where I grew up and you could just open the door and go in. And I used to just like to sit in this space. It was so quiet. I really loved the rituals of the church, the smells of the incense, and I loved all the stories and it feeds in. Although I'm not a practicing Catholic, I know that it's been very influential on my aesthetic. I love that you're verbalizing the things that you grew up with that still stay with you because I think that similar to you, there are many things about the religion that both you and I initially shared in childhood that I have brought forward into my adult life, even though I don't, I am not also a practicing Catholic, but I think it speaks to this idea that maybe there's a connection to what we are exposed to when we're younger and maybe even intergenerationally that we're exposed to that carries through. I would agree with that. I think the reading that I did in addition to, well, for example, I had several books right on my table next to my bed growing up, and I would read and reread them and they were the Old Testament, a children's Bible, Greek myths, grims fairytales. And so that idea of metaphor and that idea of morality and thinking about that all came through in all of those books. And even though I didn't really think about that for many, many years now at this point, looking back, I can see how that formed my interest in metaphor and symbolism and also just heaven, hell, duality, all kinds of things. I think originally come from that reading in my childhood. You also have this interest in writing and in fact you have a degree in Well, no, actually I do have a degree. My undergraduate degree is in painting, but I minored in English. I entered college as an English major thinking that I wanted to be a writer. So reading has always been very important to me and I wanted to be a writer. When I got to college, I chose a college that had a strong English department, but in my back of my mind, I was really interested in the art department. And when I visited the college, Skidmore College, I saw the studios and I saw, I smelled the oil paint. And inside my mind, even though I was saying I was going to be majoring in English, I was thinking, I really want to explore this. I really want to dive into this. And I did right after I got there. So I did change my major, but minored in So some might suggest that those are very different, the writing mind and the artistic mind, but you've interwoven them. I don't consider myself a good writer. And I think one of the things that happened I got to college was I realized I wasn't a great writer and I felt much more as if I could communicate with materials. I mean, I write my statements, but I often get some help, but I still love reading and I still feel like reading informs my work. And I do write in a journal a lot, and I do record my dreams and I have for decades. Talk to me about that. Yeah, so that's kind of my writing. My training at Skidmore College was very perceptual, looking at things and drawing and painting them landscape figure. And I did that for many years. But when I went to graduate school, my goal was to work more abstractly. I didn't really know how to do that. So I began by working from photographs, and then I was studying literature in graduate school also. Then I started to draw images from poetry, and then I realized I actually had my own poetry in these journals that I was keeping. I would record dreams that really had strong images or very strong feelings, and I would often illustrate them. And I began the dream journal when in 1981 when I was first married, my husband and I got married in our twenties, which was pretty young, early twenties. And I had always been interested in my dreams, but I hadn't really thought too much about it. And then I had this dream right after I got married that I was having a baby. I was on the operating table, I delivered a baby, but it was a tube of Mars gold paint, not a baby. And Mars is God of war. And I thought to myself, this is a prophetic dream, probably this is potent imagery. So I began the journal and I've been recording dreams ever since then. And so in graduate school I started to draw images out of my dreams. And so that's how I began to work more abstractly. And of course it's gone to much more towards geometry since then, but that's how I broke the spell of making a horizon line and starting my paintings or looking at something and drawing that. I just wanted to go into the studio with a blank canvas and work from my mind really. Are there recurring themes that you've seen in your dreams? Yes, definitely water, birds, fish. I think those are the things that occur the most. Swimming, being underwater, nothing that I really use directly in my work now. I really feel more like I recording my dreams in my journal all these years is sort of the bedrock. It's this trying to be attuned to a collective set of images or the collective unconscious. It's almost really like a process that just helps me be in a space that I want to be in. Is that hard as an artist to bring yourself to be in that space, given that there can be so many distractions from the external world? Yes. Well, we all live with distractions. And so when I go into my studio, I try to create a place where I don't have distractions. It's not easily done, and it seems to be getting harder, but I don't listen to, I shouldn't say, don't. I rarely listen to the radio. I rarely listen to music. I try to have silence, and the silence lets me actually see what I'm thinking or hear what I'm thinking, hear what the painting is saying or not saying. So that's something that it's a meditative type of process. So that's something that I really try to facilitate for myself in the studio. But it's a challenge and it's a continual challenge to do it. I think it was around 1999 that I decided to turn off the radio and just work in total silence because there was just too much and politics and all the issues that we have now, of course they come into my work, but in a broader way, never in a very specific way. I mean, I think actually working in a way that's meditative and quiet and ritualistic is actually something that I can offer to other people when they look at my work. And I'm not saving the world, but I'm offering a space for people to be quiet and to be thoughtful and maybe even devotional in a sense. The Fibonacci sequence is an important element that you've explored over the years. Yes, the Fibonacci sequence is something that I found in my study of sacred geometry. And what's about it is it's so, so simple, but it's a growth pattern that's also found in nature. So it's ancient and it's just you take two numbers, add them together, one and two become three, three and two, five, five and three eight forever. And the sacred geometry, which I've been studying for, I don't know, 20 years, really provides almost like a structure for my work. And I found that I love centricity, and my work always starts in the center and goes out, and you can have three rings, three concentric rings coming out, and they're beautiful. But if you use the Fibonacci sequence for those rings, the spacing to create the spacing for them to go out, it just seems better, more, right? So it has a lot of beauty and balance, but also a lot of energy. For those who aren't aware of sacred geometry, could you explore that a little bit more? Sacred geometry is also called philosophical geometry. And I became interested in it because I was working around 2000 or maybe late nineties with both geometric forms and organic forms or botanical forms, and I was combining them and I was thinking a lot about the idea of duality. My mom gave me a very old dictionary that belonged to her grandmother, and there were all these beautiful engravings at the back and sheets of botanical images, sheets of geometric images. So I just began using those directly and combining them. And then one day I had some stencils in my studio and I overlapped two circles, and when you overlap two circles, it forms this almond shape or eye shape, it's called the vesica Pisces. And I thought to myself, wow, this is a geometric shape, but it's organic. And I said, this is an amazing shape. So I realized I had seen the Virgin Mary sitting in it, and it does also suggest fertility. So I started researching it, and then I found out it was called the Vesica Pisces, and then I found out that it was something that sacred geometry explored, and I got a workbook on sacred geometry. So I sort of found it, and then it opened up to me. And sacred geometry was like the geometry that I always wanted in high school because it was symbolic. It wasn't dry, it was a language, and I just was really drawn to it. And I know some people probably think geometry hard-edged, boring, static, and yeah, geometry and geometric can be static, but I was looking to make more sensual geometry. And so by studying sacred geometry, finding out a lot of what geometric forms have symbolized throughout time in different cultures, it's almost like a language like Egyptian hieroglyphics is the way I kind of thought about it. And so I've been using it ever since. I use it very simply though. I mean, I am not a mathematician. I was never good in math. If you had told me years ago that I would be using math or even simple math in my work, I would've laughed. I would've said no. But now the minute you say geometry, I get this like I am excited about it all the time. I really like this idea of symbolism and of the language. And I know in my work with Chinese medicine and acupuncture, because as a medical doctor, I have the very kind of western medical, but I've been doing a lot of work with the yijing and with the hexagrams of the yijing, and there's 64 of them. Wow. So nice. I love hexagons though. I'll look into this. Yes, yes. And it's a series of lines. So these are hexagrams. So there, there's a series of lines, but the series of lines all mean something. They all have a definition. Two, three lines mean something, another three lines means something. It's the yin and the yang. And the fact that these types of languages go so far back and even further back than perhaps the spoken language that continues and that you're able to put this into a visual is so compelling. Oh, I'm glad that you feel that way. I mean, I feel like looking at diagrams, for example, from medical diagrams from that far back or Tibetan mandala from, I go back from the fifth century, I feel like these images from way back, they're simple. They are universal, that we all have some relationship to them. And part of why I do the work that I do is to bring some of those shapes and some of those images into contemporary culture and maybe give them a new life or just a new look. And I've been really interested in Tibetan mandalas and tantra drawings from India, Australian, aboriginal work, a lot of bodies of work that they might be anonymous because, or as we say now, unidentified artists made these works. And I like that kind of anonymity for my own work almost. And I feel like they're really important images to be seen again, and I think most people know about them. But I think that the eastern cultures are so, so beautiful to me, and I have been, they've resonated for me along for a long time, but of course they're not my cultures. So it's just always been this idea of trying to combine eastern and western images since I obviously grew up in the West. So it's a delicate balance looking at those images, but not lifting them, letting them deciding that you might want to work on, for example, right now I'm working on a body of work that's called immutable. Then the images I feel are immutable like that. They're there, they've always been there. And I'm using ideas from the Tibetan mandala tradition with blueprints of western sacred spaces like a Tempe to in Renaissance Italy or a gothic cathedral. And I'm seeing how these spaces or how these images are exactly the same, they're the circle and the square and a central images at the most important place, and they radiate out. So to me, that's just amazing that two cultures, as different as that could be shaping their sacred spaces with the same forms, It almost seems like an understanding of this very foundational commonality could be healing in a way, in a situation where I think we are now, where I think with globalism, we're so much more aware of what is going on in other parts of the world, but there's even kind of a friction in a sense of the othering. But if we could come back to a place where we understand that really there is a lot of commonality. Then I think that would be a path forward, perhaps a time that otherwise feels very riven with strife. Yeah, I agree. I mean, ideally, I think that would be one way of looking at my work. You were describing to me before we started talking on air about the idea of having your work in context with other works and the power of that. Could you talk to me about that now? Yes. There's actually a couple of exhibitions that I've been in, group exhibitions that I've been in over the past couple of years that have really made me feel as if my work was in a context that I would love it to be seen in, which is not always easy to see your work in the correct context. The first one was an exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, and the title of the exhibition was Sixfold Symmetry Pattern and Art in Science. And it was curated by Rachel Seligman and who was the curator there, and Rachel Dale, who is a math professor at Skidmore. And so I did get to have a series of work standing alone, which I was really happy about the hour series, which uses the FCI sequence, but then they included a single painting of mine on a wall that was installed, a big wall that was installed like salon style with lots of different pieces. And it was a surprise for me that they installed a piece of mine in this installation. And so in the installation, the other works included shaker gift drawings and also some Tibetan mandala, some really old Tibetan mandalas borrowed from the Ruben Museum in New York and several other. And I just thought, oh, I loved seeing my work with that work. And then more recently, I was in a show called Cosmic Geometry in New York, and it was curated by, well, a collective of two artists called Hilmas Ghost. And so their two artists that came together around the work of Hilma f Klim, who is someone I really love. And so they curated a show. It was almost all women and all of us were using geometry, and a lot of us were talking about spirituality, and that was just an amazing exhibition to be in. And I loved it. And one of my favorite artists that I've looked up to for many years had a piece in the show too, Dorothy Rockburne. So they're group shows. They're not where I'm presenting my work in a large solo exhibition, but it supports the way I think and very satisfying to me as an artist to be in those two contexts. Yeah, and then one more that's wonderful, that's also local is temporality at CMCA in Rockland, and that was a few years ago, and all the artists were working with the idea of time and the passage of time is one has been one of the themes in my work for a long time. And so I was really happy to be in that exhibition too. Then that was organized. Let's see, Suzette McAvoy was the director there, and Bethany Angstrom was the curator. This idea of being able to curate and bring together a visual community. I know that the artistic community is very strong, is really interesting because as an artist, you are showing up and you are creating your own work, but you're not necessarily thinking about how would my work look next to somebody else's, even if you're engaging in a tradition that is similar, but to know that somebody else is looking at various artists' work and being able to put them all together in a way that aesthetically makes sense, that's a different sort of creativity and art in itself. A curator's creativity too. And for example, with the Hilmas ghost, both the two artists, Daniel Teter and Shermis de Ray, who are the collective Hilmas Ghost, they both do work in this vein, but they also look at so much work, think about it. And then they have this gift of bringing it all together, and they actually use the tarot to install the show. And so each artist had a tarot card hanging next to their work. It was just so refreshing and different. And yeah, they're very gifted. Hilmas Ghost, both of them as artists and curators. Curators do amazing things. They really think, really think through a lot. And to work with a curator like that, it's a gift. Well, on a much smaller scale. I'm always amazed when I go into the Portland Art Gallery and they have the artists who are having an opening, but then they have the group and the way that things are situated in the gallery itself, I always think to myself, I would never have thought of that. I never would've thought about, it's not just color, it's color, it's form, it's even sometimes a little narrative and all of those things together. And just to have a mind that's able to bring those things as one is very interesting to me. And it's usually someone who's studied art history and has a very broad knowledge. And then in the case of hilm as ghosts, for example, they bring it down to a more narrow body of knowledge and work within that. But yeah, it's important. So a lot of what you and I are talking about, is very much on the creative, the intellectual, the emotional, the bringing forth from inside, but all artists have to simultaneously live in the physical world. And I know that you have a child that's friends with my brother, for example. So clearly there's that element of the physical world is the continuation of the human species, let's just call it that in a broader sense. How has that in your life, what does that balance look like for you to be able to show up and be a parent, for example, and then go back into the studio and be an artist? Yes, I mean, I would say it hasn't always been easy, especially when I have two sons. They're 16 months apart in age. I came out of graduate school pregnant not knowing that I was, so that right away before my career had really taken any steps forward. I had a baby and then another one, and I always kept my studio work going when my sons were really small, I taught part-time in New York, and I also worked at a newspaper, a local newspaper doing pay up and lay out. But I always had a small studio, something that I could go to, and I would often in the early years go to the studio at nine o'clock after my husband got home from work and work until midnight. So I had a lot of energy then, and I could do that a lot. I actually found that having kids made me more organized, more efficient. I had to be, if I wanted to continue my work and I really wanted to continue my work, I needed it. It was something that I had to have it. So even if it was just drawings, even if it was just thinking about work that I was going to try to work on next week or something like that, and I mean, you don't make a lot of money when you're an artist and especially don't make a lot of money when you're a young artist. And that I did not really take into consideration naively that it was going to be hard to pay for daycare. So I didn't have that much daycare. I didn't, but it all worked out. It all worked out well. And I remember the first day when the boys went to school together and they were both going to preschool, and I just remember thinking, we're walking out the door, they're going to school. I'm going to have more time for working and teaching. And I would not trade. I would not trade being a parent for anything because they have been the joys of my life really. But I think daycare is a big issue. I'll just go right there. I mean, the United States could really use daycare and help with daycare because that's so important. Yes, I would agree with that. I mean it has changed somewhat now with I think there are more men who are participating in their children's lives to a much greater degree. But having gone through myself in a time where I also, in medical school, I had two children and I absolutely understand exactly what you're describing, that you have to be organized and also you have to maintain a small space for yourself. And also there was much more of a sense that throughout my career, it was an interweaving of the children and the work that I didn't have always the same sense that their other parent did. There was much more of a delineation as get in the car, drive away, come back. Whereas in my work, it was always, I would bring my children to my office, for example, where they'd be, I'd wait until they went to sleep before I was doing my writing. And I don't know that that's gender specific, it just is sort of role specific, but I think I'm glad that things have shifted so it's not so starkly male and female as it once was. Right. And it's always changing as they get older. There's always different issues in different places where you have priorities. And my sons were definitely my priority, but felt I often had that feeling that something wasn't getting enough attention, either the work or the family. And so there was always that tension of trying to balance both things in those years. And now I have my mother living near me. She's 97, so now I'm on the other end of that spectrum. So yeah, women do a lot of caregiving. And I do like what you're saying that there's also a richness to that. There is. There's definitely a richness to it. And with my children, I would never give up the what I'll call the energetic investment that I made in their growing years. And I really feel like that was a privilege to be able to do that, to engage in a way that I think it can be also hard for people who, they tend to be men sometimes, but who are able to more easily separate job from home life because I feel like there's a missing out that they will often suggest that they've had. So I think it can go in many different directions. It can. One thing that I see happening now for this generation, my son's generation, is the parental leave for both parents, including the father, three months sometimes. My son had three months, and I do have one grandson. And I mean, I laugh about it now, but it wasn't funny at the time, but I think my husband went back to work after 24 hours were, I think he felt compelled to get back there and no one was giving him a lot of time. So there's a very, very different way of thinking about that, which is really fantastic. Yes, I would agree with that. And although I feel stronger for having gone through the time where there wasn't parental leave and there, I feel stronger for it. And also I'm glad that we're doing it differently now because I think it was not an easy way to be a parent early on. No, I think the expectations at that point were that women could do everything and it was a lot harder than we anticipated. Another thing that I was interested to learn about was you have a family history of genetic health. A neurological disease, that my father died of. I think that's another reason that time is important to me. I always had this very strong connection to the idea of time. Even in graduate school, my professor Jane Wilson has said, "oh, I see this sense of time in your paintings just with the flurry of brushwork", which is not what I use anymore. But my father died when I was in my late thirties. He was sick for about 10 years before that. And when he became ill, I just realized that time was so precious. I mean, I think we all know that, but I began to think about how I might be able to embed that sense of time in my work. And that's when I started using that single image, like a bead, a bead from a rosary. It's just a circle or a dot of paint, but I thought of it as a bead on a rosary or a prayer bead, and that you would hold the bead and move to the next one and be really present while you were doing that. And I wanted to try to communicate that in my work. And so for a while, I did paintings with just this single geometric image. I just covered these big canvases with all these, those were the paintings that were in the temporality show at CMCA and that one painting I did that was eight by five feet of just these beads starting at the center using the Fibonacci sequence and growing out and trying to embody this sense of time and how important it is for us all to be aware of it. And I think that that idea of even a little bit of urgency and value of what is here now with us is something that maybe is more easily lost if we're not paying attention. Absolutely. And I think actually it's a commitment almost every day with the amount of information coming towards us to us, it is sometimes hard to be present right now. I find it harder. I mean, I do. I see a difference in myself. And so I'm trying to, and I'm wondering about the generation coming up and the younger kids, my grandson, how that will be for him, just always attached to the phone and the computer. It's a different type of life. You and I live in the same town. I came here because my parents lovingly chose this town for me. But you came here because as an adult you chose to move to Maine, so why is that so? Well, my husband and the two boys were living in New York, outside of the city in Hastings on Hudson, and I really loved it there. It was a village on the river, but my husband loves the outdoors. He was working in Manhattan and doing that in and out on the train, and it just didn't seem sustainable to us. And we thought we would really like to try living someplace more rural. We thought it would be great to raise the boys someplace where they could access the outdoors. My husband loves hiking, skiing, rock climbing, and so we started thinking about it. We looked at Vermont, there really weren't any jobs. And then my husband just got hit by a search firm and they offered him a job. He's a software person. That's how he started out. And it was here in Portland, and we just thought, let's try it. I mean, we knew we could come back if it didn't work out. It was a really hard change for me because I had never lived anyplace that was really this rural, I was away from family and friends. I didn't have a job. So it was a tough two years, I'd say first two years, but right away, I love the air and the light and being near the water. I grew up on Long Island, so I love being near the water and it's so clean, and I always miss New York. We always traveled back a lot. My family was there. And of course, New York is a great place to seek work, but we thought about going back to New York at one point, and we looked around a little bit and we said no. So we've been here since 1990, not Yarmouth, but we've been in Maine since 1990 with three years in Boston for another job that he took for a few years. Yeah, I mean, and it's thanks to my husband and the hard work that he's done all these years that we have had so much stability and that we were able to come to such a beautiful place as Maine and live. So I have him thank for that. Yes. And I want to also make sure, just doubling back on the conversation around raising children, that this idea of partnership is so important and that even as my experience, like your experience is this interweaving of parented and the work that we do, the people that are more focused on the external work that brings in more of the money, that's actually very important as well. It's very important. Yes. He's worked really hard and he's just retiring actually probably soon. Although I think he'll always have a bit of a hand in startups. He's very active in the startup community mentoring. But yeah, it was a good decision. I think my older son now lives in New York, but he's always wants to come back to Maine. And my younger son lives outside of Boston, but he's here every weekend during the summer. And so they both love Maine, and I think it informed them in a really wonderful way. Well, it's been my pleasure to spend time with you today, Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you for asking so many good questions and drawing me out about my work. I appreciate it. Well, I've long admired your work, and so to be able to actually meet the person behind the work is always such a pleasure for me and in particular in this case. So I appreciate your taking the time today. Thank you. Today. I've been exploring creativity and the human spirit as we do every week with artist Grace DeGennaro, and I