Homage to Ucello #4, Anna Hepler (Photo: Courtesy of Karin Thomas)
I have written about Sebastian Smee’s review of Anna Hepler’s show at the Portland Museum in an earlier post but there’s another passage in that article that has continued to hold my attention. Hepler’s approach to her work and to teaching runs close to my own views, and is worth sharing here.
Meghan Brady, an artist and a friend, describes Hepler as “a question-asker and a seeker. She’s not satisfied by taking things at face value. Instead, she’s always turning the issue at hand upside-down and inside out in an attempt to see it from a fresh vantage point.’’ Hepler adds, “I do like that idea of really going with something until you reach a conclusion, or a point of exhaustion.’’
And on the subject of teaching, I found commonality in Hepler’s conversation with Smee:
She insists she would have answered questions about the sources of her work quite differently a year, or even six months ago. Why the change?
“It had a lot to do with leaving academia,’’ she says. Hepler gave up her teaching post at Bowdoin about a year ago, having taught there for six years on a part-time basis. She was given the chance to teach full time on a tenure track but, she says, “I knew I didn’t want that.’’
The pressure on her as a teacher to be didactic and to “uphold the holy mantle of authority’’ made her increasingly uncomfortable. “It pollutes,’’ she says, “and for me there’s a kind of hypocrisy involved.’’
Now she can focus, she says, on maintaining “a risk-taking state of mind’’ and on “really living something, not making work that is about something.’’
“If you’re going to embark on this process,’’ she explains, “you have to rely 100 percent on intuition.’’
That’s just about the best summation of my own resistance to teaching. While many of my friends have figured out how to do it—how to teach and be a maker—it was never an approach that rang true for me. Not every artist signs up for the “100 percent intuition” path, and perhaps, in the spirit of Robert Benchley’s famous truism*, that is the operative deliminator. But this passage from Charles Burchfield’s journals (my paean to his current show at the Whitney is here) fits well in this conversation: “The subconscious mind seemed to be in complete control—and I did unpremeditated things which later turned out to be exactly right.”
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*Robert Benchley, a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, once stated this truism: The world is divided into two groups—those that divide the world into two groups, and those that don’t.
After reading your first post on Helper, I went off and started reading about the artist and looking at her work and decided to write a post for my readers, mainly just about the exhibition. I’m going to add links to your posts.
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