DAAG: INTERVIEWS: ANN BALDWIN

Ann Baldwin's success demonstrates the unbounded potential of the self-taught artist. Ann has gained recognition for her abstract collages, developed techniques for using encaustic (wax), acquired a scholarly awareness of art history, taught students across North America, and written extensively on the business of art. She has achieved all of this, yet she only began painting twelve years ago.

I didn't start painting until 1991, just a couple of years after coming to California from London, England. There were no visual artists amongst my family or British friends. Since I was a teenager I regarded myself as a writer, producing numerous short stories and even a couple of novels, completed at the kitchen table while my children were small. These remain unpublished. I also tried my hand at writing storybooks and poetry for children. But my real love was playwriting. I taught literature and drama in London high schools for 15 years, so I was continually inspired by the books and plays we read Shakespeare, Joyce, Beckett, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence especially.

While I was teaching English in Berkeley, I found the need to take up a right-brain hobby. At first I painted delicate watercolor landscapes, then I branched out into plein air oil painting for a while. It only took 3 years to discover abstract painting. It was such a challenge! I mean, I knew nothing absolutely nothing about art history. There I was splashing acrylic paint around on canvases spread out on the floor of my garage, with no idea whether they were any good. All I knew was that I was having a wonderful time.

Soon it became an all-consuming passion, and I would come home from school in the evenings spending hours absorbed in my art. I read everything about the arts. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had an exhibition of Bay Area Abstract Expressionists about that time. I attended the seminars and met Hassel Smith and Walter Kuhlman. I was excited to be able to identify myself as an abstract expressionist. Suddenly I started to call myself an artist. I even cut back on my teaching hours so I could devote more time to my art. My husband converted the garage into a studio and I opened it to the public. People started buying my paintings and I thought, "This is easy!" Of course, what did I know? I was so naïve that every small success thrilled me. Anyway, I was determined to earn the title 'professional artist', so I worked very hard at producing the work, learning to mat and frame, marketing myself, and even taking up teaching art.

It was pure chance that I started with watercolor. In 1991, my daughter was visiting from England and we were planning a trip to Yosemite. Unfortunately I had hurt my back, so we couldn't go. In order to cheer me up, she suggested I take up painting. The idea was ridiculous I knew nothing much about art and had no desire to try something I felt I couldn't do. Nevertheless she bought me a book by Tony Couch which included templates of trees, mountains, etc., which you were supposed to paint. She also bought me a small set of watercolors. In a moment of extreme boredom, I decided to give it a try. I'll never forget the excitement I felt as the paint ran out of control and the colours merged in unexpected ways. I was hooked! The rest of my life as a schoolteacher was all about organization and structure, even if I did encourage the kids to have fun. Painting was a process with a completely unpredictable end. (Needless to say, I never used those templates!)

For the first 2 or 3 years painting was simply a hobby, a diversion from the stresses of my job. At one point I attended a local community class and the teacher told us that you couldn't call yourself an artist until you'd been doing it for 10 years. This brought out the rebel in me. I decided to try and sell some of my watercolor landscapes through local art shows. Heady with success and naïve enough not to know that it wouldn't always be that easy, I began entering juried shows. Rejection hit me pretty hard because by then I already thought I was much better than I was. Then the reading began I've always been an avid reader. I got a hold of as many books on art history and art practice as I could find. Slowly I began to see my work in perspective, and I realized I had a very long way to go. But the challenge was a huge motivator. I was determined to paint and paint until I could truly earn the title "artist". Gradually I cut down on my hours teaching school, built a studio, and invested in huge amounts of supplies, until it eventually seemed natural to answer the question "What do you do?" with "I'm an artist". By then I was selling paintings fairly regularly, teaching art classes in my 'spare' time and even showing in a number of local galleries. Two years ago, after 10 years of painting, I gave up my day job to become a full-time artist. By then I was making enough money from selling my paintings and teaching art workshops to make it financially viable.

Given a certain amount of talent, dedication is absolutely the key. And I don't mean creating art enthusiastically for a few months of the year, but making it a very regular practice, whether you feel inspired or not. Those days when nothing seems to go right are just as important for artistic growth as the ones which result in your best work. Being thoroughly organized and active on the business side is also essential for success. Many artists avoid entering juried shows, sending out publicity, networking, and managing their mailing lists. They resent the time spent out of the studio. Yet an extremely talented artist won't make it unless he or she has opportunities to exhibit. There are so many out there waiting to be discovered with dozens of unsold paintings stacked up in their studios. It's hard to generalize how many years it takes to make enough money to give up your day job, but ten should be enough.

If you mean as a student, only the occasional evening class at our local community college and one or two workshops. You might wonder why I felt qualified to teach art when I had no formal training. I guess that being a very experienced teacher in another field helped enormously. Also, I've always adopted a very down-to-earth approach, showing people what I have achieved through trial and error and a willingness to experiment. When I demonstrate, I avoid the 'perfect' painting. Students get really excited when they see me making mistakes and turning them to advantage or covering them up.

So much that it's hard to explain it all. I remember preparing nervously for my first abstract workshop for adults, wondering if I knew enough to teach art at all. I already knew that half the students had been painting far longer than I had. Also, I was more used to teaching teenagers than adults. Well, I needn't have worried. I adopt essentially the same approach as I did when I was teaching creative writing lots of encouragement, building on what people can already do, transmitting my passion for painting through demonstration and by pouring out the excitement I feel about exhibitions I've seen or new techniques I've learned. Experimentation is the key. When I was teaching 8th grade English, one of the students requested to be allowed to write a novel for his homework during the last 6 weeks of the school year. I thought: why not? It wouldn't matter whether he finished it in school or not; at least he would have experienced the process and felt what it was truly like to be a writer. In the end, the whole class wanted to get in on the act. Some wrote every night for a couple of hours (there were a few complaints from the rest of the staff that their subjects were being neglected). Others gave up after a couple of weeks. One student finished his novel about a year later while he was in high school. He went on to Harvard where he won an important prize for playwriting. Anything is possible! You don't know until you try. If people believe in themselves, they will go from strength to strength. But they've got to keep on doing it. I encourage my art students (just as I did my English students) to be inspired by the artists of the past, but to work through the imitation phase to find their own voice.

My background in Literature and writing, obviously. When I first started using collage, it was only images from antique Model Magazines, then I discovered Kurt Schwitters and realized it was okay to include words or just letters. For 2 or 3 years nearly all my paintings made reference to Shakespearean texts. They had a definite message. Nowadays, though, I often use text for purely visual effect mark-making. My latest series uses ancient symbols used in counting.

While I was doing mainly collage, Schwitters' work had an enormous effect on me - the dynamism of his compositions, his endless inventiveness with shapes, his subtle colors, the mix of paint, charcoal, crayon, and found papers very exciting. He seemed to be giving me permission to put all kinds of junk in my own work. Then there was Joseph Cornell with his sense of mystery and strange juxtaposition of images. Faith Ringgold's quilts with their quirky narratives and handwritten text encouraged me to introduce stories. Larry Rivers' odd use of stencils to label objects, Cy Twombly's sensual scribbling, and Raymond Saunders' dramatic use of the grid, allowing the integration of almost academic drawing of figures or flowers in chalk on old doors pasted with torn posters, have all had an effect on my work. Jasper Johns' habit of referencing or paying homage to other artists in his work, his determination to go his own way and eschew trends, his intellectual approach to content I can identify with all that. I am also inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts. Finally, I worship Mark Rothko. When SFMOMA first acquired one of his large color field works and I came face-to-face with it for the first time at the end of a gallery, I cried like a baby.

Without doubt, the later work. I am in awe of his ability to juxtapose colors of a similar value and make them shimmer. During my last visit to the Tate Modern, I sat in the Rothko room staring at the black or brown-and-maroon Seegram Murals in the dim light, just waiting for the floating forms to appear out of the darkness. Rothko recognized that the observer plays a salient role in any finished painting. He once said: "No possible set of notes can explain our paintings. Their explanation must come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker." He wanted the observer to enter into the environment of the painting. This is a wonderful notion.

I almost always mix my media. I can't stop myself from grabbing any available material and including it in my paintings. I remember being scolded by a community college teacher for using white gouache to restore the whites in a watercolor painting. "You can't do that!" she declared. On another occasion I was criticized for incorporating a photograph in an acrylic painting. I was never a very good student because I so much enjoyed breaking the rules. My only concern now is that my media are compatible from an archival point of view. For example, wax will not fuse with acrylic, so I never use these media in the same painting. Collage creeps into most of my work, even if it ends up getting buried under layers of wax or paint.

Several. I encourage my students to break rules all the time in order to get rid of their inhibitions and preconceived ideas about what makes good art. However, I always seem to require of myself that certain rules be kept. The need for color harmony is one; balance in composition is another not too much, but enough to stop the boat from capsizing. I aim to make my paintings as archivally sound as I can, though with found collage this is not always 100% possible, and I try to keep them clean.

Absolutely! Because I work in multiple layers, whichever medium I am using, my focus changes almost by accident. For example, I might begin an encaustic with the idea of employing phrases from James Joyce's "Ulysses" or Proust's "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu". I spend a lot of time searching for just the right text, often writing it by hand on the support. Then, as I start layering on the paint, I forget to reserve the text. Of course, I can always write it again, but sometimes I choose to lose it. After all, I know it's there. The paint which covers it is just as valid. I was once told by one of her previous students at the Art Institute that Jay De Feo buried some of her jewels in "The Rose". Knowing that doesn't change the painting for me, but I'll bet it did for her!

I am mostly interested in the heavy textures which can be achieved with wax. I incise it with bamboo pens, screwdrivers, dental tools. I fill the etched lines with oil stick. I add layer upon layer so that I can scrape some areas back to previous colors or buried pieces of collage. I do charcoal transfers by drawing on tracing paper with dense charcoal, then laying it face down on the wax and burnishing the back.

I heat the pigmented wax bars on a griddle set at 200 degrees Fahrenheit. I use cheap bristle brushes and Japanese bamboo brushes, as well as metal palette knives, to apply the pigment to the panel. I then use a heat gun or an iron to fuse each layer of wax to the previous one. For small areas, where I want a lot of texture, I'll apply a small blowtorch the type used for crème brulée. Occasionally I smooth the wax further with a heated palette knife or trowel.

If you're not careful, it does. Holding the heat gun too close or at the wrong angle to the painting will melt earlier layers and cause them to mix with the current application of pigment. This can create an interesting marbled effect, but it's not one I really want. With control, it is perfectly possible to fuse two layers together without mixing the colors. I prefer to allow colors to show through by scraping back in some areas to earlier layers when the wax is cold. Unfortunately, this is the technique which led to my hand injury.

Much as I try to move away from it, yellows and golds are dominant in the vast majority of my paintings. A therapist once unearthed the reason. When I was about 7 years old my mother made me a pretty yellow dress. One day my grandmother told me I looked beautiful when I smiled wearing that dress. Whether this is the reason I love the color yellow or not, it certainly finds its way into a lot of paintings.

In my work I aim for transparency or translucency, perhaps due to my beginnings as a watercolorist. I like the play of bright light against deepest dark. I first noticed this tendency while creating a series of paintings based on the characters in Shakespearean tragedies, especially "Macbeth". It was an attempt to reproduce the exaggerated contrasts in stage lighting.

10 years ago I couldn't paint large because I had so little space to work in. However, creating small paintings enabled me to be very prolific and to learn a lot about composition, color, and technique. It also made the paintings more saleable. When I turned to abstract expressionism, I started to buy larger canvases. To be honest, I'd always prefer to work large. The engagement of the whole body in the process is exciting to me. But you do need a lot of space, and even my double garage has its limitations. You need to be able to step right back from the work frequently. So far I've never painted anything larger than 6' x 4'. The reason is a purely practical one: that is the largest size canvas I can fit in my van! Not a very artistic reason, is it? Recently I've been commissioned to paint something much larger I can't wait! Since I've been selling my work through galleries, I've found it easier to make money from large paintings than from small ones.

Working in encaustic on door panels proved physically very difficult for me. I had to lay the panels flat on my work surface, which was barely large enough to hold them. Because the wax cools so quickly, I had to keep turning the panel so that the part I was painting was closest to the griddle. Recently I've had to give up encaustic painting due to arthritis in my thumbs. A few months ago I had to have my right thumb joint reconstructed as a result of too much repetitive scraping and etching motions. Although I've fallen in love with wax as a painting medium, it isn't worth damaging my hands for it. I am currently waiting for my right hand to heal before I have similar surgery on my left thumb.

Absolutely. In fact, if I hadn't come to California, I would never have painted. Having made an enormous change in my life by leaving the country I had lived in since I was born, I felt that anything was possible. I had left all my friends and family behind, so no one in the US knew who I was or what to expect of me. I'd already had to give up a well-paid job as a curriculum coordinator in a London high school in order to accompany my husband to San Francisco, so life as I knew it was completely derailed. It was a cathartic and quite frightening experience, but it gave me the freedom to start afresh. I also had a reputation for being successful in my career in London, and it was a relief to be somewhere where I could be who I really wanted to be. All my reading was about American Art and artists. Most of my influences have been American: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Joseph Cornell. My husband and I became American citizens about 5 years ago.

It is 13 years since I left London, so I am somewhat out of touch with art at the grass roots level. I go back once a year to visit with family, but there is very little time for trips to the art museums and galleries. However, I subscribe to The Art Newspaper , Modern Painters, and the Tate Magazine, which keeps me up-to-date. Charles Saatchi, the big advertising executive has had an enormous influence on British contemporary art, for better or worse. He buys up almost everything which young British artists (known as YBAs) like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin produce and has enormous control over what they exhibit. He has recently opened up a huge space near the Tate Modern and I hope to visit it in September when I'm over there. I particularly like Rachel Whiteread's sculptures produced by casting concrete in the spaces inside or between objects. I saw one which was made from the space in front of a bookshelf at the Haines Gallery in San Francisco a couple of years ago. How I wish I could have afforded to buy it.

The experience of teaching in the Mexican jungle was absolutely unique. We went as a group and stayed in the remote town of Xilitla in the Sierra Madre mountains. I already knew some of the students; others have become my firm friends. Some were experienced artists and wanted little instruction, others were beginners and needed a lot of help. We painted all day either in the studios or in the jungle itself. Despite the fact that I was focusing on abstract painting in acrylic, some of the participants insisted on doing realistic scenes en plein air. We would have a critique every night on the terrace while sipping margaritas, and I would gently point out ways to develop a more abstract point of view. By the end of the week, an extraordinary transformation had taken place: the paintings were wild and wonderfully colorful! I'm not sure that it had anything to do with me, so much as it had to do with the 'other-ness' of the location.

In Montreal my collage students came from all over North America and each brought with them very individual life experiences and talents. One class included a calligrapher, a designer for the Disney corporation, an altered book artist, a rubber-stamper, an oil painter, and a graphic/computer artist. 3 students only spoke French. Fortunately I speak the language because my daughter has lived in France for the past 10 years.

Whichever city I am teaching in, it's always an energizing experience. I feel that I learn as much as I teach. It's amusing to think that I gave up my job as a school teacher to become an art teacher for adults. I am very careful not to take on too many teaching commitments. I turn down more offers than I accept, because I don't want to be forever on the road or flying back and forth, at the expense of spending time in the studio. It's easier to make money from teaching workshops than it is from selling art, but the bottom line is that my true love is art-making, not art teaching. At the moment I'm focusing on teaching Abstract Painting with reference to art history. My Montreal workshop this year has nothing to do with collage. We are focusing on the techniques and approaches of Kandinsky, De Kooning, and Motherwell. I will be teaching the same workshop in Portland, Oregon in July, and I'm sure that the experience in each place will be totally different.

While in Montreal I visited a lot of galleries and two museums. There was an amazing Edouard Vuillard exhibition at La Musée des Beaux Arts. This post-impressionist is less well-known than his contemporaries like Gauguin. I was astonished at the range of his work. It was also noticeable that he only began working on large canvases once he started to receive commissions. The more important the purchaser, the less freedom there seemed to be in his work. David Rabinovitch, the sculptor in steel and wood, was at La Musée d'Art Contemporain with a magnificent body of work. There were highly abstract charcoal drawings which I'd never seen before. They inspired me to work in charcoal again. My visits to the galleries were less inspiring, perhaps because I didn't really know where to find the best places. Too much of the art looked like the stuff you see in any large city in the tourist areas. However, I did come across one neat gallery in Old Montreal, La Galerie Art Monaro (www.galerielydiamonaro.com), which was showing exciting abstract work by Pierre Patry, Lisa Tognon, and Pierre Chénier. I only had 4 days after my workshop to look around, so I'm not really in a position to comment knowledgeably about the art scene there.

My overall approach is designed to heighten artists' awareness of four main elements of composition: Color, Line, Shape, and Texture. In abstract painting there is no object to attract or distract the viewer. This leaves some students wondering what to paint! I like to begin the workshops by having students paint both quickly and intuitively, using a mixture of media. I tell them to focus on the process to enjoy the flow and drag of the paint, to marvel at the way colors mix rather than on the product. Then I line up the paintings and analyze the ways in which the various elements have been used. I talk about rhythm, repetition, direction and orientation based on what we are seeing in the work in front of us. This helps students to analyze their own work later. After the first day, each day is devoted to examining and trying out the techniques of a different abstract artist of the past. In this year's workshops, I am focusing on De Kooning's gestural brushwork and use of impasto, Kandinsky's use of wash and line, and Motherwell's minimalist approach to collage. By the end of the workshop I hope that the artists will have a greater sense of the range of possibilities open to them as abstract painters. Even if they subsequently decide not to be abstract painters, they will have learned that abstract principles of composition underlie even representational paintings, whether landscapes, still-lifes, or portraits. Too often when I'm jurying a local art show, I see carefully rendered barns or horses which seem to have no real relationship to their environments in terms of color, shape, and value.

By the way, a strange thing happened in Montreal this year. A few hours into the first day I was faced with a rather hostile set of students demanding to know when I was going to begin teaching my layering techniques in collage. Several had signed up with the belief that I was going to teach them "my method" the one which characterizes the pictures of mine which have been reproduced in magazines and in a recent book, Collage for the Soul, published by Rockport. I don't know how they got their wires crossed, but I felt obliged to try to give them their money's worth, so I ended up interspersing abstract art with my collage techniques. Although it was all rather challenging, by the end of the four days I do believe I'd converted quite a few people to abstract painting!

Both. I feel that as a self-taught artist with little or no experience of the art world prior to beginning to paint 10 years ago, I am in touch with reality. In my business workshops I give artists dozens of tips about how to organize themselves, and pitfalls to avoid. I outline strategies for getting into galleries based on my discussions with gallery owners, other artists, and my own attempts. I tell them the practical details about how and where to sell without galleries, based on my research in the Bay Area. I go to a lot of shows and openings! I illustrate my talks with anecdotes about some of the stupid mistakes I've made, problems I've encountered with people and the wonderful ways in which sharing information with others can be rewarded. Before writing an article, I will often read everything I can find on the subject, and talk to a bunch of artist friends or members of my critique group about their experiences to help me to gain a wider perspective. I try not to preach or to present a too-rosy picture of what's involved in being a professional artist. It would be easy to say I did this, and I did that, and look what I've achieved in 10 short years. But just as with the painting demonstrations, people want to know about the true process, warts and all. Sometimes they are happy to hear that at one art festival I sold only two small paintings, but I lived to fight another day!

Excluding museums which are every artist's desire, I suppose if I could take my pick it would be a large gallery in an educational setting. I like the idea that people who know about art or who are learning about it would get a chance to see it over a period of a month or two. Of course, I also enjoy having solo shows in a commercial gallery with beautiful white walls and plenty of space for larger paintings. I have participated in juried exhibitions all over the USA, most of which I never attended because it was financially not viable. This is frustrating, but a necessary part of the process of building one's résumé. I still show in a lot of local shows because I like to support the organizations which mount them. Besides, I enjoy attending the openings and chatting with the other artists.

Providing you have good slides, anyone can enter. It's something of a lottery whether you get in or not, but well worth a try. I've been accepted for the past 5 years but this doesn't give me any advantages over people who've never entered before. As it happens, until June I was still on the waiting list for this year's festival! I admit it came as a bit of a shock. I've begun to rely on the money I made every Labor Day weekend. But this year I entered slides of more 'edgy' work because I didn't want to be in the situation of having to create paintings like the ones I was doing last year or the year before just to sell at an art fair. Finally I got a letter telling me I'd been accepted in two categories 2D Mixed Media and Painting. As a result I've decided to pay for a double booth and exhibit both types of work. Sausalito is the only art festival I do. It's a wonderful location, and there are thousands of art lovers. I have a steady clientele which has built up over the last 5 years. They expect to see me in the same booth again this year, but I'll be setting up in a different place. I hope they'll find me!

I wish! I get so many requests from students to produce a book or a video, and I did approach a couple of the larger publishing houses about producing a book on Mixed Media Painting. However, they both said there was no market for that kind of thing. I used to be a fiction writer, and I know all about rejection after the novel is written, but being rejected before you've begun is less time-consuming!

I used to have very lofty ambitions nationwide recognition, shows in major museums, articles in Art in America, that sort of thing! Now I'm a lot more realistic. This past year has been an amazing one. Despite the economy my large abstracts are selling well through several California galleries and I've had more teaching requests than I ever imagined. My main aim is to be able to sell almost as fast as I can create. Right now, with my hands out of action, this is a problem! I also want the continued freedom to create according to my own vision and not someone else's idea of what will sell. I guess I'd like to be represented by galleries in other major cities somewhere down the line. But I'm in no hurry.