The Stories Within Art: Ann Trainor Domingue on Connection and Place

Today I have with me Ann Trainor Domingue, who is a Portland Art Gallery artist, certainly amongst one of the more creative individuals that I know, and I know quite a few. I happen to love her work. I've interviewed her previously for this podcast, and I'm just thrilled that you've taken the time to join me again today. Thank you, Yes, and thanks for asking me to come back. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Well, the pleasure is entirely mine. I mean, I think I did a little fangirling the last time you were in. You know that I love your work. I mean, your pieces are just beautiful and I'm really enjoying the direction that you have been going in. I keep seeing these sort of new things that you've been doing. You are doing some work with words for a while and with poetry, and you've been doing more work with abstraction. And so as an artist who's been doing this for a while, I'd like to hear where you are now and what's been going on since the last time we talked. Just wanted to say thank you to Portland Art Gallery. You guys always have a way of displaying my work in a really creative and interesting way, and it pairs with other people's work in really interesting ways, and I always appreciate how you're quite thoughtful about doing that. With my work, sometimes I feel myself, my work is a bit out of sorts as opposed to some of the other artists there. But then when you hang them near another person's work, it's like, wow, that really does look really kind of cool together. And they are both very different pieces. Even subject matter might be different, but I appreciate the eye that you and the rest of the gallery people have to present my work in a really different light than I might have seen my own self. I mean, I love that you're saying that I personally can take no credit, but I would certainly say that Emma Wilson, Sean Thomas, Jess Brayboy, Kevin Thomas, that whole group, and you're so right when I go to the gallery openings and I see a piece of yours or a piece of another artist and it's in sequence with someone else, and I think, wow, I wouldn't have put those together. That curation was actually brilliant. It tells almost a completely different story, And I've been paired with many different artists in the gallery, and each time it happens like, wow, I don't think I would've thought of that in that way, that that would've worked, and sure enough it does. So yeah, that's really one thing I really appreciate. Well I'm glad you said that. And your pieces are also interesting because I've seen you'll do a series, but then something really unexpected will pop up and you'll do something in maybe a different series or you'll do more with shapes. And I know you have a background in graphic design. So what at any given time inspires you to say, "this is what I want to work on right now"? Well, I think what happens, and I've done this for a long time, is working in sketchbooks. So I don't try to make a full painting in a sketchbook. I do really leave it as a thinking process and just a thought process, like a little nugget of something might've happened that day or I saw something in passing and I'm like, "Ooh, I really want to remember that." Or "Gee, I did that 10 years ago. Why didn't I bring that forward?" Or "why did it all of a sudden pop back into my head that maybe you really should bring this little nugget forward" and then I'll explore it a little bit further in my sketchbook. But again, they really are thinking sketches. They're generally not a finished thought, but sometimes if you go through my sketchbooks page after page, I obviously am really digging in hard to something to look to see if I can explore this concept a little bit further. So a good example of that is how I've been using the fishermen and a girl figures together, meaning the girl could be a mom, a sister, a friend, a wife, a girlfriend, somebody that they know. The pairing is up to the viewer, which I hope happens because when I title them, I try to leave the title then broad enough for them to, as a viewer feel like they could or they know that person or someone kind of like that person the way that I present them. And then they can project their own image of who they think or what that relationship is all about. And in my sketchbooks, I've tried lately accidentally, but then I intentionally did it. But I draw these little line drawings of how to connect the fishermen character and the girl character. And then at some point I joined together the pattern of the woman's dress and it overlapped the fishermen's garment. And then I had put no line to separate them. I just married it together and put little fish going back and forth and this kind of thing. So it was just another way of showing relationship without changing my core subject matter. So that's one of the subject matters that I continue to develop. And then in starting my paintings is really where I've been wanting to explore abstract painting, and I've looked at it for a long time and read and tried to dive in a little bit. And I've chosen to be super playful and not so intentional when I start my painting. So I just posted something and it had a whole series, and you would never guess that the way it started is the way it landed when I did this post because I am just, I don't know, sometimes I feel I just am going to use up all this extra paint. I don't care what my lines look like, I don't care how it's evolving, and then all of a sudden I start caring, which is then I get in my head and I'm not sure I really meant to be there and then became really direct and trying to do something instead of leaving myself open to accidents for a longer period of time. So that's kind of what I'm working on, and it's been a really interesting way and a bit different for me to work that way, which for me, it's important that I feel like I'm entertaining myself while I'm painting. I don't want to be so meticulous that every single stroke or line needs to be perfect way. At the beginning of my painting process, I am trying to keep a lot more open time, and that's what this abstraction thing is allowing me to do. And then at some point might be the next day might be a week or two later if I've just left it leaning against the wall in the studio that I figure, I think I'd really like to bring whatever these figures or the fish or some other imagery into the piece and then push it along to a finish. But it can be a distance from the beginning to the end. And sometimes I'll get a piece back from the gallery and stuff and think to myself, I don't know why I did that that way, or Why am I getting this back from the gallery after it's had a lot of eyeballs on it and I re-look at it and I will modify it. And generally speaking, it's a much more satisfying piece from my point of view. It must be an interesting thing that you need to do to move from working through the process you typically use and kind of your mind kind of goes in a pattern direction, which I think that's the way most people's minds work when they're used to doing anything to keeping your mind open to saying, oh, I don't want my mind to follow that pattern. I don't want to use the same process. I'm going to stay open. So how do you keep your mind open? How do you keep your... It's not a straightforward way of working for me. So with that career path of graphic design and stuff in my background, things are, you've got to have things done at a certain time. You have to work with a team of other people, they have to weigh in and everybody kind of weighs in on something, but everybody's striving already for a point of a finish, which is by the clock, by the date on the calendar, something very, very specific. But then in doing my art, I kind of brought that same working method forward, which is why I do my sketchbooks and sketches and thinking, and it just felt normal to me. But then I hit a point within the last couple of years that I was like, wow, bringing all this forward. So I, I'm fighting against the tide that I am trying to go against and change my direction, but I feel as though I've got this well grooved track in my brain that it feels more satisfying to do it over here or predictable or comfortable and familiar, but I really am enticed by some other people's art when they do this over here. So why can't I go over there? So now I've given myself some time in the studio where this time is to finish these things that you're more familiar with, but this time over here, if you feel in the least bit that you're going back to that older way, I have to stop and just kind of rethink my brain is like, "Nope, this is your playtime. You're feeling like you want to finish and go in this direction, but try to pull back and just let this happen over here" and maybe allow sort of my more emotional side to drive where it might be headed even if I don't know where it's going. So that's probably the biggest part is I don't know where it's going to go and I have to just simply have faith that I've been doing this for a while now, and generally speaking, I've learned to have a sense of, I think this is on its way, or I think this one needs to go against the wall and not just go against the wall but turned around and face the wall so I can't overthink it. And it's funny. Then I'll turn it around maybe a few days later and go, "oh, well, that's not as bad as I thought the territory that it might've been heading in." So that's where I've been taking this sort of new way of working lately. I remember I've read the book on writing by Stephen King multiple times. That's one of my favorite books about writing that's out there. And he talks about putting the draft in the drawer and leaving it and leaving it for some period of time so that you come back at it with fresh eyes so that you can see it in a different way. And it sounds similar to what you're talking about with not only are you putting it aside, you're putting it aside and you're turning it against the wall so that your don't want your brain to work on it in that moment. Because it's probably overworked to begin with. And I do tend to do that. I tend to add a lot of goings on in the earlier stages of my work, and I'm learning to, I think I like that part of the process. I'm going to keep it, but I'm also going to work harder at simplification and keeping what's necessary to, I hate to say tell a story with my work. That's not really what I'm doing. I'm the underlying thinking of what I put together and how I put it together. I think that's my story, but I always want to leave room for somebody else to feel something and make their own story. But at the same time, I'm trying to simplify then without taking away the heart and soul of peice in favor of simplification. But when I use acrylic paint, which is primarily what I do use, I am very comfortable with just wiping the whole thing out and painting it all over or sanding it all back and starting again or putting a glaze of an overall tone over something to shift it a little bit, but not in a huge dramatic way. But if it needs it in a dramatic way, I'm like, I'll just do it now. Now I'm just not afraid of materials, not afraid of doing it over, starting over, sanding it back, that kind of thing. I remember in our last conversation we talked about this idea of story and how you always hope to have somebody else bring their own perspective to it, which I have always found so fascinating because the thing that always rises to the top for me, and one of the reasons why I really enjoy your work so much is that it just comes with a story. And maybe it's because my brain is meeting your art. And so that's where the story exists. But it's fascinating to hear you say again that you're bringing things together in a piece, but you're not necessarily wanting to specifically call out a story. There was also a transition for me where I was primarily a landscape painter using the landscape as the basis for creating a semi-abstract, my interpretation, my impression. So I would focus and accentuate on whatever the startling part of a snapshot that I took and then accentuate that in a larger version of whatever this view was. So I wasn't exactly painting a portrait of a landscape or seascape or edge of the water and the land, which is where I found myself finding more interesting things to work with was on the edge of land and sea or river and forest, or that's where I found a lot of elements that I like to work with, going from landscape, adding the human figure, of which I've done a ton of figure drawing life drawing classes, not only in college, but for many years after that, didn't do really anything with those drawings other than hone my drawing skills and that kind of thing. And then I've always taken snapshots though of people in gestural positions, whether I'm literally taking a photo or I just have my camera remember those, not a phone, just a little one down by my side and just snap a photo and then go home. And it's all cockeyed and crooked, but it captured the gesture of someone sitting or standing or walking or doing something. And then from that, I would interpret that through line in my sketchbook and then build a composition from there. And then I just really had to eventually put a stake in the ground of what subject matter was I going to paint about if I was going to, because I just have liked a lot of things, which I've thrown into a lot of paintings. It's like, you got to stop that and let's focus here. And that's when I started to say what I really loved is coastal. I love the ocean, I like the salt water, I like all the elements of working and living. And that's where my career and my thought process really kind of finally came together. And it was shortly after that that I found Portland Art Gallery, but I was well on my stake in the ground was in tight, and I was already defining for myself where I was going to take my work, and now it's just continued to go on. So it's a combination landscape, seascape, PeopleScape life and living and working near the water like that. And then it's just continued from there to be developed. When I look at the people that you place in your pieces, there is always this connection. There is always this sense of joining with one another. I mean, it's often a sense for me when I look at it, it's a sense of caring, love, meeting. And so your description of that edge, the meeting of the land and the sea, the meeting of the working and the non-working, it goes along with that for me, that oftentimes it's also the edge of each individual meeting, the edge of the other individual. Yeah, that's interesting that you say that. So artist friend of mine, she looked at my work, this was quite a number of years ago, and she said, oh, I wish you wouldn't put the buildings in there. I'm like, really? And she more of a purist about landscape only things that grow or live there and that kind of thing, like humans and humanness wasn't supposed to be in the landscape from a point of view. And that really got me thinking that, oh, well, that's actually what I really like about this. So thank you in an awkward sort of way for pointing that out for me. That may be obviously your choice. And then mine is going to be, I love the way little buildings and light shines on and sunset, sunrise, anytime of day and how it shapes the land and the way we live in it, if you're respectful, I think is just beautiful. Take the ride here. I mean, it's pretty spectacular if you don't live right near this, it's always refreshing to see it again. But then how all the little homes and stuff are set on hillsides and want to take care to take advantage of that beautiful view and be able to sit with it longer than I do. I go and I live on the edge of a forest now, literally. So that's what our view is and stuff. But yeah, marrying both together, taking my graphic design, it's really obvious the way that I put shapes together, that I have some sort of history with that. And I've just always actually loved silk screen printing, the sharpness of edges. I'm trying to mix it up a bit in my work, let edges soften into another area so that I'm not quite so linear like that. There's several things that I have in my consciousness as I'm working to just smear that line a little bit more. Don't worry that it's not crisp or whatever. Just allows some of that casual, spontaneous line to happen and then just leave it be without fixing it. As you're talking, I'm thinking about a storm that occurred within the last few years, and it pulled a structure that had long existed on the edge of the ocean out to sea. And it was something that at the time, I believe made national news because this was such a beloved structure. Nobody had been in it forever and ever It wasn't actually active, that little set of buildings. No, absolutely not. But it meant something to people. And then when the storm came and it then disappeared, it was something that really elicited a lot of emotion from people. So the fact that you're putting your stake, you're putting here are these structures in the in-between in my pieces, and they're very temporal. Yeah, very fragile, at the edge of, and not truly not anchored. They possibly were anchored to the bedrock that was under the pilings, but that's a little dicey when you live on a rocky edge of the ocean versus Cape Cod, which is sand. I don't know how that place is going to survive some of these upcoming big storm things, but to see a structure that you thought was very stalwart and strong and standing there and providing however people think about it, when you just sit and rest and look and watch as the light changes and tides and that kind of thing, it does feel like a friend or super familiar. It's like, oh, I'm home. If you're a Red Sox fan and you go by the Citgo sign, it's like, oh, yeah, okay, I'm almost there. Or cross over the bridge and now your GPS says, welcome to Maine or backwards, welcome to New Hampshire. Those kinds of things when they're gone, that can be a really startling change for people and it's hard to adjust to, And maybe that's why you have your figures almost always holding hands. Yeah, that simple connection. And again, it's whomever, I'm not doing it. I haven't designed hugging one another or back to back front. It was just facing, sometimes there's a nod in the heads that they're acknowledging one another, but just simply holding hands. And I reached out, we were with our grandchildren recently, and the littlest one was doing something, and then I just put my hand out a little and she held my hand. I'm like, well, that's really sweet. I didn't know if she would actually come and grab at eight years old, and she's a bouncy, energetic little one, and she did that. And it's like, that's all I'm saying. And if people would love to project anything further than that, and I try not to be too descriptive with the figures and facial features and that kind of thing, and I do kind of a stocky character just feels some strength and some body in that. So I intentionally do that and shape them in that way. And that's all I'm hoping that somebody just might feel some bit of a connection to another person. And I think my story's done for that painting, and I'll move on to another, but that thread, I felt quite comfortable carrying that through. So you probably see more of that. Well, I will probably continue to love these pieces. Thank you. So I welcome all of the ones that you bring forward because I mean, I can see a version of something that maybe I've seen before. That's your work, but it's always entirely new. I mean, it's always reimagined in a way that appeals to me. That's interesting that you say that too, because in working with galleries and stuff, sometimes the sense of, I need you to do three of these. I'm like, oh, I'm a designer again. I instantly had to put that other hat on and take my apron off because now I already, so to be able to, for the gallery to be accepting of me looking at my sphere of influences that I bring into my work, allowing me the freedom to, oh, I think I'm going to go over here a little bit, and then I don't want to make a giant step. That's not what I do personally. Most times I'm really fairly careful. And it's like, are you sure? It's like, I don't know. And I need a bit of sureness. There's a little line in a Winnie the Pooh Storybook, which I did not read a lot as a kid, but my husband has always loved this. Winnie the Pooh thing. And Piglet and Winnie the Pooh are standing on a together, and I think they have their arm, it might be a back view, and they have their arm around and Piglet says to Winnie the Pooh, I just wanted to be sure of you. And so just that little gesture and there's nothing else going on, and they're just walking a little path or something. I'm like, oh gosh, that is just, it's so simple, but I think it can be pretty universal if you let it. So I try to allow the figures that I put in without being portraits to have some of that universal sensibility about them. You also created a series that I happened to love because I love words and when I was writing a Substack Off the Wall piece about you and your work, and Off the Wall is our online magazine for the art gallery is doing. I pulled in one of those pieces because to me, the work that you were doing where you were taking a piece by a writer and you were subtracting out to create a different piece by this writer, it was so powerful in a completely different way. And I'm wondering what inspired you to do that at the time, and whether it's something you think you'll go back to again. Well, that's interesting because I've loved Mary Oliver poetry, as you know, and the simplicity of how she distills down nature into these just beautiful few sentences and stuff. I find that amazing. Another person who writes about art and making art, but he's also a writer, Austin Kleon, and he's written these few art books. One title is called Steal Like an Artist, and he's funny, witty, sarcastic, but gets to the point of things. And so that's where I roughly discovered blackout poetry, where he was taking volumes of work, I think even of his own and selecting words and then deleting everything all around it, but literally put a black line right through it. So it made this sort of graphic sensibility about it. So that's what got me first. And it's like, well, how do you do this? How do you know what words that you're going to cross over? Because you're supposed to keep a word and then keep blocking out, and then until you find another word, skip it and then keep, you don't want to pre-read it before you do it. And I thought, oh my God, that's a fascinating exercise of being careful about your selections and stuff. And yet at the same time, spontaneously trying to do both of these at the same time. So he really was the one that put his little poetry pieces together. And then I thought, wow, I've got this little old book over here, the Woman of Andross, I think the name of it is, and Thornton Wilder. And I just grabbed a random page. Turns out that the book is about, let's see, the environment that they're living in is on the ocean or near the water. And so as I'm reading this, I'm like, oh, that sounds kind of neat. So I kept it and kept it, and then in the end, it's a whole page of let's say 150, 200 words, and all I kept was maybe 12. And then it just had this unique, cool, very brief power poem in a way that changed the entirety of what that page had actually been about in that story. So I do challenge myself with this whole word and poems, and I've never thought about, I've always struggled with writing as a child, a class that I had, I think I know I was probably a freshman even in high school in this writing class. Now I want you all to write a composition about anything. I'm like, oh, dear God, what am I going to write about? And I just couldn't put anything zero on the paper. I did not know how to start writing, and I should have by then, but I had no, I just didn't know. I could spell, I could tell you definitions. I just couldn't figure out how to write this composition thing. How do you put thoughts together? And then once I got through that class, I did finally have a method of doing that. And then I do love to read. I like novels, that kind of thing. I'm not a spies or sci-fi and things that none of that interests me or ones that are going to scare me to death. And it's like, oh, now great. I have to try to sleep after that. So I do try to work with a word or a few words and we'll see where that goes. I'm not sure how I'm going to integrate it in upcoming work, but you never know. It's just one of those things in my toolbox that I'll bring back out again As you're talking, there's so many things that come up for me. I mean, one of them is this sort of the subtraction and the idea of what you take away and what remains. E.E. Cummings, the poet, he's known for the way that he uses punctuation in a really different and really brilliant way. And I think part of the power of his work is in the sparing and unique approach that he's taken, or at least it wasn't unique at the time. I think it's been copied more than once since then. But I mean, I think that it is that deliberate placing of something unexpectedly, but then also making sure that you're not overdoing it Right. And it's very sparse, and the space around the words on a page is as important as the words themselves. So you can't separate the space around the words or the spacing of each word. It's like, why did he break that right there? Why is there so much space? Does he want me to think about this? And I remember being fascinated as a kid, seeing that for the first time. It was like, wow, he didn't capitalize any letters. And that was shocking to me that you could do that. That's okay to do that. Well, as an artist, it most certainly is. I'm like, okay, then I'm with that. I'm good. So you don't have to do punctuation correctly. I'm like, Nope, apparently not. I'm like, oh, I think I love being an artist. It just opens up other worlds to me, but in a creative way, even though I was afraid of the writing piece. So now when we write things online like, oh, pops AI, and I'm suggesting this word to you, I would never say that word. What computer makes you think I would ever say that word? And I'm a bad typist. I don't watch the screen while I'm typing, so I'm typing here. So now I don't even see those suggestions on the screens, and then I just ignore it, and then I go back and clean up my own stuff as best I can. And you can feel free to edit anything that I ever said. That's just me trying to write coherently and stuff. But yeah, I think this whole AI and the suggestion thing is more of an annoyance. I wish I could just figure out how to just shut it off. It's like, could I just simply write something? I don't want you to edit it while I don't want those thoughts of those words in my head, I know I say things differently. I know I punctuate incorrectly sometimes. AI is something that I find fascinating because as somebody who's written for a really long time, you are right when you have a generic AI something and it comes back at you. That's exactly the way that I feel like this doesn't sound anything like me. I would never say this, in which case it's not useful. However, the ability to train AI so that it actually utilizes patterns that have been in one's writing before, I just find that so interesting because So customized from your language and the way that you've been writing it pulls. It's like, well, you use this over here, maybe you'd like to use it again over here, or whatever. That would make more sense in a creepy sort of way for me, but maybe I'll have to get over that as well. Well, I think for me, what AI has done is it causes me to think about creativity in a different way. And it pushes me, AI can take, because I've been writing for such a long time, it can take things that I once did back 20, 30 years ago, and I can look at it and he'll present it back to me and I'm like, wait, is that the way that I used to use words together? And it just causes me to think about evolving the way that I do things now. So I think for every person, it's a little different. I think if you just use it as it's going to the grocery store and being like, yeah, I'll take that pre-made salad, you can do that. Or you can say, oh, they're suggesting I use these organic greens, and I hadn't thought about pulling in the red raspberries that are ripe right now. So I think there's different ways. It's a tool that can be used. But I don't want to go too far down the AI path because what I really wanted to ask you is what are some novels that you've read recently? I love good writing, I love great novels, and I'm wondering if there's any in particular that you've lately read that you can recommend? I really allow the selection to, I'll choose it based on an interesting title. I don't necessarily go after an author. I did go through a series recently. Now it's not going to come to me, but I do make the selections when I choose. And I do read on a Kindle, not the regular book itself, but I do make those selections. If they actually say that it's a novel, then I'll get in there and I'll do that. I'm reading one right now. It's the partial of the title is a Whistle Stop Cafe on, I can't remember the author and who that is. I believe it's a woman. But it's a really interesting way of writing. You feel that you're in the south in the forties and thirties and forties, and then it's coming back up into the 1990s, I think by the time this piece is done. So those kind of period pieces, and you really get a feel for the goings on and the time in the times, I think. But yeah, much more of a novel person. Is it David Archer? Oh gosh. That series was like, stay Up till midnight. I was like, oh no. Now I have to get the next book because the cliffhangers were unbearable. And then move right on to the next book. Well, you've got me intrigued. I'm going to have to go look up David Archer and also Whistle Stop Cafe, and thank goodness for Google. I'm sure that's going to be pretty easy. It'll pop right up and then it'll come right in there. Yeah, so I can't really move. I can't finish the interview without asking you about 1997, because we asked you ahead of time and tell us about a pivotal point in your life. And 1997 was the date that you came up with. It was a pivotal moment in your artistic journey, and I am intrigued. Yeah, it was that for sure. So in about somewhere in 95, 96, Mike and I got together and we realized that we are really quite compatible and stuff, so let's see where this goes. And it all went well. And we got married in 97, and for Christmas of that year, we were married in July and December. I'm like, oh, I think I'm going to paint a painting. Let's see. So I think it might've been in 98. We had been out west visiting his parents who had lived in El Paso, Texas. And I had never been to that area of the country before, so it w